Measuring decision flexibility in production planning

We present a measure of decision flexibility for production planning problems. The flexibility of a decision is related to the size of the choice set associated with this decision. In production planning problems this set is a convex polyhedron in an n-dimensional space. Our measure of flexibility is the volume of this set with additional information about the shape. By using a new method recently proposed we give an analytical expression of the measure of flexibility. Sensitivity of flexibility to various parameters is also given analytically as a byproduct. Experimental results on a simple inventory problem are provided. An alternative measure of flexibility for large-scale syslems is also presented and discussed.