A goal programming model for production planning of perishable products with postponement

One of the important characteristics of perishable products that a decision-maker has to take into account seriously is that the price will drop significantly after a day, or a season. Hence, over-production and storage of such products is not recommended. In this paper, the production process for perishable products is proposed to be divided into two phases by applying the concept of postponement. Consequently, three production activities – direct production, master production and final assembly – will be considered. A preemptive goal programming model to solve aggregate production planning for perishable products is developed, in which three objectives are optimized hierarchically. A set of Hong Kong data has been used to test the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed model. Results demonstrate that the decision-makers can find the flexibility and robustness of the proposed model by adjusting the goal priorities with respect to the importance of each objective and the aspiration level with respect to desired target values.