A model for determining tactical parameters for materials requirements planning systems

This paper develops an approximate model for simultaneously determining reorder intervals and planned lead times for MRP systems. Unlike previous research, this model explicitly considers commonality, non-instantaneous production, multiple work centres (with multiple machines and with limited capacity), and queue inventory carrying cost. Four heuristic solution procedures for the non-linear integer optimization problem are proposed and compared with an exact branch-and-bound algorithm on a set of forty test problems. The results suggest that two of the heuristics are both effective and efficient.