decision-making processes are chara

decision-making processes are characterized by a case study of a
Brazilian industrial plant that produces packaging for eggs and
fruits, which often fails to define production plans that meet the
demand for all products, and spends long times doing setup operations.
Although this work was motivated by a case study, the
company studied is typical in this sector and it is part of a group
that comprises a vast portfolio of companies, including an equipment
manufacturer for molded pulp industry. So, we believe that
the approach developed here can be easily adapted to deal with
the production planning in other molded pulp production systems.
To the best of our knowledge, there are few works in the literature
that combine production planning and process selection
problems. Thus, the contribution of this study is threefold: (i) characterizing
the production planning in molded pulp packaging
industry, identifying the most relevant features of the manufacturing
process and the major challenges; (ii) approaching decisions
about defining molding patterns and planning the production of
the manufacturing process, simultaneously; and (iii) including different
types of setups separately, which can facilitate the study of
techniques to reduce changeover times, for example, SMED (Single
Minute Exchange of Die) very common in Lean Production. Three
setup types considered in this industry are: stopping/starting the
production line, attaching/detaching molds to the molding
machine and setting up other components of the production line.
This paper is organized as follows: the next section presents a
brief literature review of production planning problems, mainly
extensions of lot sizing and scheduling problems in industrial contexts;
Section 3 describes the manufacturing process of molded
pulp packaging companies; Section 4 presents an optimization
approach proposed to deal with the production planning in the
studied industry; Section 5 reports the computational tests performed
with this approach; and finally Section 6 gives some concluding
remarks and future research directions.