Developing an order acceptance function for Limis Planner

Limis Planner is an Advanced Planning and Scheduling software designed by Limis and used by Limis’ customers who are companies typically making end products in response to customer demand. For the acceptance of dynamically arriving customer orders, the companies currently use the scheduling function of Limis Planner which requires high computational time and assumes fixed capacity. We develop a method for order acceptance which considers capacity flexibility (i.e. overtime) and due date flexibility. The proposed method consists of a procedure (i.e. loading procedure) to load a sequence of orders and a heuristic to determine a sequence of orders to be planned. As per the heuristics, we consider Local Search, Tabu Search, and a constructive heuristic (CH). The loading procedure which is based on a finite loading method from the literature considers the practical aspects such as assembly-type routings, workstations with multiple resources having varying work shifts. We conduct experiments using the dataset of one of Limis’ customers. Simulation experiments reveal that the loading procedure can be considered reliable in terms of timeliness of overtime and tardiness performance. Further experiments with the heuristics show that CH is a promising method in terms of solution quality and computational time.