Tactical level planning in float glass manufacturing with co-production, random yields and substitutable products

We investigate tactical level planning problems in float glass manufacturing. Float glass manufacturing is a process that has some unique properties such as uninterruptible production, random yields, partially controllable co-production compositions, complex relationships in sequencing of products, and substitutable products. Furthermore, changeover times and costs are very high, and production speed depends significantly on the product mix. These characteristics render measurement and management of the production capacity difficult. The motivation for this study is a real life problem faced at Trakya Cam in Turkey. Trakya Cam has multiple geographically separated production facilities. Since transportation of glass is expensive, logistics costs are high. In this paper, we consider multi-site aggregate planning, and color campaign duration and product mix planning. We develop a decision support system based on several mixed integer linear programming models in which production and transportation decisions are made simultaneously. The system has been fully implemented, and has been in use at Trakya Cam since 2005.