Advanced planning systems for hard disk drive assembly

Abstract

This dissertation studies a new class of production planning problems motivated by an actual manufacturer of hard-disk drives who offers its customers the approved vendor matrix as a competitive advantage. An approved vendor matrix allows each customer to pick and choose the various product component vendors for individual or pairs of components constituting their product. Two problems are considered: a multi-period scheduling problem, and a stochastic production planning problem. This work presents the mathematical models for the problems studied, and develops the specialized methods and algorithms to solve them. The algorithms are implemented and are shown to outperform general purpose techniques significantly. To the best of our knowledge this work is the pioneering effort that investigates this class of problems in production planning research.