ABSTRACT
The total problem of planning production consists of the following decisions: demand forecasting, the total floor space needed, the number and type of equipment, their aggregation into groups, the floor space needed for each group, the spatial relationship of each group relative to one another, the way the material and work pieces move within groups, the equipment and methods to move work between groups, the material to be ordered, the material to be produced in-house, the assembly layout and process, the quantities and timing of stock purchases, and the manner of storage of purchases and the items that are to be part of the information support system. There are no methods that determine the answers to these questions simultaneously. There are numerous models that consider each of these decisions as a subproblem to be optimized. When all the solutions are pieced together sometimes the whole will be suboptimal.
