Stability-based Short-term Capacity Requirement Planning under Uncertainty

This paper proposes a new method of short-term capacity requirement planning (CRP) from the viewpoint of “stability”. The term stability refers to the higher predictability of a released capacity requirement plan (or a load plan), and also signifies the robustness of a manufacturing process against internal/external uncertainties. The objective of CRP mentioned in this study is to determine a stable allocation of each manufacturing resource to given operation orders with the aim of minimizing the probability that the resource requirement of each operation order exceeds the capacity of corresponding resource. Through some computational simulations, it is demonstrated that the proposed CRP method is applicable as a short-term CRP method by applying it to a flexible job-shop manufacturing system.