A case study for advanced planning and scheduling (APS)

This paper presents a case study for the advanced planning and scheduling (APS) problem encountered in a light source manufacturer. The APS problem explicitly considers due dates of products, operation sequences among items, and capacity constraints of the manufacturing system. The objective of the problem is to seek the minimum cost of both production idle time and tardiness or earliness penalty of an order. An intelligent heuristic is applied to the problem, and the results demonstrate that significant production performances can be achieved while ensuring customer satisfaction as opposed to normal practices followed in the company relying on human expertise.