Production planning method for seru production systems under demand uncertainty

The seru production system is a new-type manufacturing system arising from Japanese production practices that can simultaneously achieve high efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness. In this paper, a worker and production quantity allocation optimization method for multi-product seru production systems under demand uncertainty is proposed. To handle such demand uncertainty, the Monte Carlo technique is employed and the optimization problem is formulated as a bi-level mixed-integer linear programming problem. At the first step, a worker allocation problem is solved before demand realization is observed. As the second optimization step, the production quantity allocation is then conducted based on the observed demand realization. The proposed method is applied to several numerical problems to illustrate its effectiveness.