Effective planning, scheduling, and synchronization of all production activities\nare the key responsibilities of the management of a manufacturing plant.\nTherefore, it is necessary for the management of the plant to design the production\nprocess so that the total production cost is minimized, subject to the\navailable resources that cannot be compromised. In this study, a biscuit manufacturing\nplant is selected and an integer linear programming (ILP) model is\nformulated to determine aggregate number of batches that the plant should\nproduce from each product per month so that monthly demand is satisfied\nwith available resources. The objective is to minimize the monthly production\ncost of the plant. The required data were collected from the production plant\nfor a period of one month, and then, the objective function and constraints\nwere formulated. The management has given a paramount importance in satisfying\nthe demand so that there will not be any unsatisfied customer. According\nto the managerial requirement, any feasible solution obtained by the\nmodel must satisfy the demand. Therefore, demand constraint is considered\nas a hard constraint. The management is forced to adjust the labour and machine\nrequirements more frequently according to the monthly demand. Thus,\nlabour and machine hour constraints are considered as soft constraints. Formulated\nILP model was implemented as a spreadsheet model in Excel and\nsolved using Excel Solver which uses the simplex algorithm and incorporates\nthe integer requirement of the model when finding the optimal solution. Total\navailable labour and machine hours can be changed within a particular\nrange until a feasible solution is found. The solved model determines the\nnumber of batches to be produced from each product and the corresponding\nminimum cost per month. By implementing this production plan, manufacturing\nexcess of biscuits can be avoided and hence utilizes the physical and\nhuman resources to the optimum manner. Additionally, the machine and\n labour idle times and the needed overtime hours can be identified using the\nsolution while the additional overtime cost will be added to the monthly\nproduction cost.
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