A master production scheduling procedure for stochastic demand and rolling planning horizons

The problem of interest is a one product, uncapacitated master production schedule (MPS) in which decisions are made under rolling planning horizons. Demand is stochastic and time varying, and effectiveness is measured by inventory holding, production setup, and backorder costs. Typically, in both the research literature and the business practice the stochastic nature of the problem is modeled in an ad hoc fashion. The stochastic MPS problem is usually solved by adding safety stock to production quantities obtained from a deterministic lot-sizing algorithm. Here, the stochastic nature of the problem is explicitly considered, as an optimal algorithm for solving the static probabilistic dynamic lot-sizing problem is adapted to rolling planning horizons. The resulting algorithm is found to dominate traditional approaches over a wide variety of experimental factors, reducing total costs by an average of 16% over traditional methods.