Production Scheduling by the Transportation Method of Linear Programming

Abstract

With fluctuating sales, a manufacturer must have fluctuating production, or fluctuating inventory, or both. Penalties are associated with either type of fluctuation. Several papers place this problem into a conventional linear-programming framework. This paper suggests that the same problem may be placed into a transportation-method framework and, further, that many transportation problems may be extended to include multiple time periods where this is meaningful. A generalized scheduling problem is placed here into the standard form of the transportation table.