An Alternative Model of Aggregate Production Planning for Cement Company: Solving with Particle Swarm Optimization

The Aggregate Production Planning (APP) is a schedule of the organization’s overall operations over a planning horizon to satisfy demand while minimizing costs. It is considered as the baseline for any further planning and formulating the master production scheduling, resources, capacity and raw material planning. For APP of Cement Company, a large number of optimization criteria- regular time production, overtime production and inventory level of cement, clinker, limestone, gypsum and subsidiary ingredients play a very important role. Complexities have arisen when practitioners try to balance these large numbers of constraints during the planning horizon. In this research work, authors try to construct a mathematical model that reduces complexities and makes an effective balance among different constraints. The model then solved by well-known heuristics algorithm named particle swarm optimization (PSO) and compare the result among various types of PSO algorithm. Authors also find out the limitations of PSO to solve APP problem.