Capacity planning for packaging industry

This paper presents a capacity planning system (CPS) to generate a feasible production schedule, improve production efficiency, and avoid overcapacity for the packaging industry. CPS applies the concept of workload leveling and finite capacity planning to assign orders to production lines by considering several production characteristics such as drying time, quantity splitting owing to the cutting pattern of the product type, and the variability of machine capacity threshold. CPS consists of five modules, namely, order treatment module (OTM), order priority module (OPM), lot release module (LRM), workload accumulation module (WAM), and workload balance module (WBM). The experimental design is used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed CPS with five factors (number of orders, order size, order size variance, order priority, and balance policy) with various levels and three response variables, namely, machine workload balance, order due date deviation, and lateness. Moreover, this result extends into finding the best settings of order priority and balance policy to generate the best favorable responses under the given three environment factors.