Stabilized-cycle strategy for a multi-item, capacitated, hierarchical production planning problem in rolling schedules

Little research has been done on hierarchical production planning systems (HPPS) in the context of rolling schedules with service-level constraints. Here, we adapt the stabilized-cycle strategy, which has initially been created for the master planning level (Meistering and Stadtler in Prod Oper Manag 26:2247–2265, 2017), to a two-level, multi-item, capacitated (short-medium-term) HPPS with demand uncertainty. For each planning level, we present extensions for mixed-integer programming models from literature (CLSP-L, PLSP) and introduce anticipation functions, as well as linking constraints. In a computational study, we analyze the performance of the HPPS with different rolling schedule strategies: the period-based, the order-based, and the stabilized-cycle strategy. It turns out that the stabilized-cycle strategy dominates the period-based strategy for all studied instances. For some instances, the stabilized-cycle strategy even dominates the order-based strategy; while in remaining instances, the stabilized-cycle strategy provides non-dominated solutions with a significant smaller downside deviation from service-level agreements and only a minor increase of costs.