Planning Production Line Capacity to Handle Uncertain Demands for a Class of Manufacturing Systems with Multiple Products

Abstract Manufacturing systems flexibility is critical to meet the challenges arising from the uncertain demands. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate the effect of utilizing flexibility in manufacturing systems which have the capability of producing multiple products at multiple plants. After transformation, a nonlinear polynomial programming model was proposed to describe the production planning problem, and a Reformulation-Linearization/convexification Technique (RLT) based branch-and-bound algorithm 2] is applied to globally optimize the problem. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the algorithm. At the end, we give the formulation of a stochastic programming model concerning uncertain demands.