Abstract
Production switching rule has been proposed as a realistic, practical aggregate production planing approach in discrete production environments where the number of shifts or workers predetermines the feasible production and workforce levels. This paper presents a mixed-integer programming problem that determines optimal production, workforce, and target inventory levels while minimizing relevant costs over the planning horizon under the perfect demand forecast. Since no proper algorithms are available to solve the formulated problem, a simple heuristic algorithm is also proposed. Two numerical examples showed encouraging results of the heuristic.
