Production planning based on goal programming for mass customization in a company

In this study, a production planning approach which is based on goal programming intended for mass customization is designed and developed in a firm which works on tractor manufacturing. This production planning approach is developed according to customer?s choices, product variety, and the principles of mass production. The goal programming model is developed to perform the goal of the production planning and the Decision Support System which works with this goal programming model is also performed. The computation time of the goal programming model exceeds the time which is acceptable because of the too many decision variables which the goal programming model has. For this reason, the composition of different production plans and implementation of the appropriate production plan which is selected from those different production plans is not possible in a little while. In consideration of those reasons mentioned above, local greedy search and genetic algorithm approaches which are used for the solution of the goal programming model are considered. In order to observe the performances of the proposed approaches, different twelve problem sets are composed and the solutions of these problem sets are acquired. As a result of the performance analysis, it is seen that the local greedy search approach gives better solutions when compared to the ones which the genetic algorithm provides. But we observed that the computation time of the genetic algorithm is shorter than the local greedy search approach. KEY WORDS: production planning, mass customization, genetic algorithm, local greedy search ADVISOR: Assist. Prof. Dr. Muzaffer KAPANOGLU, Osmangazi University, Industrial Engineering Department