Progressive modeling—An enabler of dynamic changes in production planning

The prevalence of change propagating from the market conditions to the lowest level of functional activities of Manufacturing Planning and Control (MPC) systems, and vice versa, urges a commensurate supportive modeling approach. Progressive Modeling – a novel and integrated problem solution approach – is introduced to handle the new challenges resulting from the dynamic nature of todayʹs manufacturing environment. It analyzes and decomposes the problem into several interacting components, builds a change-ready mathematical model and optimizes its solution. Aggregate production planning problem with a numerical example is used for demonstration and illustration.