THE PRODUCTION PLANNING OF MANY-PRODUCT ASSEMBLY OPERATIONS.

The paper discusses planning problems which arise when different products are manufactured on several assembly lines and production has to be co-ordinated with other manufacturing centres. In a limited labour market flexible production capacity requires the transfer and retraining of existing workers.
The first section of the paper explores the simplest possible planning element which still contains enough of the essence of the problems to shed some light on the nature of a solution. This model consists of the planning of production of a single product in one location, under the supposition that teams of girls may be relinquished to (or obtained from) a labour reservoir at a penalty which corresponds to retraining costs. A production planning game based on this model is constructed, and played with teams of human planners. The game is also played by means of two types of systematic decision rules:(1) a linear production smoothing rule; (2) the optimum rule for the game, developed by dynamic programming. This permits a comparison of the efficacy of human planners in comparison to automatic decision rules.
The dynamic programming model is extended in the next part of the paper to cover a more realistic model of the situation. The results of the dynamic programming analysis are shown to be a very valuable tool for the production planning of several product types in one plant, as well as for the co-ordination of different plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]