Title: Local search techniques for a short-term production planning problem at an international fast moving consumer goods company

Speaker: Nicolas Zufferey – Professeur titulaire, GSEM, Université de Genève, Suisse 

Abtract:

This talk presents an integrated approach for the short term supply chain management (SCM) at a fast moving consumer goods production plant. The problem is to determine the production quantities, to provide a detailed production schedule, to trigger the relevant express deliveries of raw material, and to manage the distribution. We propose a linear integer model, which integrates all of these decisions within scheduling, and present the practical insights of its implementation. Such decisions are very sensitive, as they directly impact the costs and the service levels of the company. To find high quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time, various solution methods are proposed, such as a greedy constructive heuristic, two tabu search metaheuristics, a basic variable neighborhood search and an enhanced one using a variable shaking operator. Experiments on realistic instances show that the latter method is efficient and robust. This project is a contribution to the SCM literature (indeed, only few references address the integration of short term decisions) and to the general metaheuristics field.

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