A production planning model to reduce risk and improve operations management

Traceability has become an essential business function to consistently supply quality and safe food products to consumers. However, it has been not rare that the efforts in traceability are separately made from routine operations management decisions. In this paper, an integrated optimisation model is developed in which the product safety related traceability factor is incorporated with operations factors to develop an optimal production plan. The model aims to improve traceability and manufacturing performance by simultaneously optimising the production batch size and batch dispersion with risk factors. Two industrial cases are used to support numerical analyses to investigate the benefit under various business situations and product features. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.