In this article, we propose a new way to improve master production schedule (MPS) stability under conditions of finite capacity. The purpose is to optimize product availability and customer service for typical situations encountered in the consumer goods industry. Using a comprehensive MPS model, we conduct a simulation study with experimental design to identify factors having a significant inf...

This paper proposes a reliability-based economic model predictive control (MPC) strategy for the management of generalised flow-based networks, integrating some ideas on network service reliability, dynamic safety stock planning, and degradation of equipment health. The proposed strategy is based on a single-layer economic optimisation problem with dynamic constraints, which includes two enhanc...

This paper proposes a reliability-based economic model predictive control (MPC) strategy for the management of generalised flow-based networks, integrating some ideas on network service reliability, dynamic safety stock planning, and degradation of equipment health. The proposed strategy is based on a single-layer economic optimisation problem with dynamic constraints, which includes two enhanc...

The divergence over the years of research paradigms addressing the production planning problemhas led to the development of an extensive set of techniques, each of which can address a particular aspect of the practical problem and none of which provides a complete solution. In particular, most approaches fail to address the circular, non-linear dependency between resource utilization, lead-time...

The increasingly uncertain business environment requires the necessity to implement more flexibility in companies. Unfortunately, companies being specialized in engineer-to-order production cannot use safety stocks which are generally used in make-to-stock productions to secure flexibility. Therefore, an alternative approach has to be developed to facilitate procurement flexibility for these co...

We describe a simple online heuristic for scheduling job shops. We assume there is a fixed set of routes for the jobs, and many jobs, say N , on each route. The heuristic uses safety stocks and keeps the bottleneck machine busy at almost all times, while the other machines are paced by the bottleneck machine. We perform a probabilistic analysis of the heuristic, under some assumptions on the di...

We address a multi-item capacitated lot-sizing problem with setup times, safety stock and demand shortages. Demand cannot be backlogged, but can be totally or partially lost. Safety stock is an objective to reach rather than an industrial constraint to respect. The problem is np-hard. We propose a Lagrangian relaxation of the resource capacity constraints. We develop a dynamic programming algor...

We consider a manufacturing system with preventive maintenance that produces a single part type. An inventory is maintained according to a machine age dependent hedging point policy. We conjecture that, for such a system, the failure frequencies can be reduced through preventive maintenance resulting in possible increase in system performance. Traditional preventive maintenance policies, such a...

Preclinical development of and research on potential Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) medical countermeasures remain preliminary; advancements are needed before most countermeasures are ready to be tested in human clinical trials. Research priorities include standardization of animal models and virus stocks for studying disease pathogenesis and efficacy of medical counter...

We compared 19 stocks of Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense collected in 1991 and 1994 from Tanzania with representative stocks from other foci of Rhodesian sleeping sickness in Zambia, Kenya and Uganda. Stocks were characterized by isoenzyme electrophoresis, restriction fragment length polymorphisms in variant surface glycoprotein genes and random amplification of polymorphic DNA; the banding patt...