Production planning and scheduling with applications in the tile industry

In this paper we consider the medium to short-term production planning and scheduling (PPS) process of a ceramic tile industry. The PPS process encompasses three problems: 1) the development of a master production plan that determines the medium-term production needs; 2) the development of a biweekly production scheduling plan that minimises the production time required to complete the set of products, so as to meet customer orders within agreed due dates and ensure the filling of connected firing kilns; 3) the available-to-promise problem (or jobs order acceptance/order selection, and delivery date establishment problem). The production scheduling problem (PSP) was addressed as an identical parallel machine problem, with machine eligibility constraints, family and subfamily setups and minimum production lot sizes. A specific heuristic and a mixed integer programming model are proposed to solve the PSP. A model-driven decision support system, applying and manipulating quantitative models, that improves the quality and time expenditure of the PPS process, is also presented.