Production planning and efficiency evaluation of a three-stage network

In this paper, we investigate the production planning and warehouse layout for an authentic case, in which, a factory usually faces a challenge in the quest for sufficient space for produce and the management of warehouse items. We consider a network comprising of a production area, a warehouse area and a delivery point area and to solve this problem an integrated model for the produce and warehouse management has been rendered. We contemplate on a mixed integer, nonlinear model programming, targeting at minimizing total production costs, set-up costs, warehouse reservation and storage costs, transportation and delay penalty costs for this problem; besides which, the  issue of perishable goods is also under consideration. Morever, we utilized the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency of the model results. This factory is taken into consideration as a dynamic network and a multiplicative DEA approaches are utilized to measure efficiency. Given the non-linearity of the models, a heuristic method is used to linearize the models. The ranking results of the dynamic network under study, demonstrated that, the time periods namely, (24) and (1) were the best and the poorest periods, respectively, in terms of efficiency.