Production planning under uncertainty in textile manufacturing

Textile manufacturing consists of yarn production, fabric formation, and finishing and dyeing stages. The subject of this paper is the yarn production planning problem, although the approach is directly applicable to the fabric production planning problem due to similarities in the respective models. Our experience at an international textile manufacturer indicates that demand uncertainty is a major challenge in developing yarn production plans. We develop a stochastic programming model that explicitly includes uncertainty in the form of discrete demand scenarios. This results in a large-scale mixed integer model that is difficult to solve with off-the-shelf commercial solvers. We develop a two-step preprocessing algorithm that improves the linear programming relaxation of the model and reduces its size, consequently improving the computational requirements. We illustrate the benefits of a stochastic programming approach over a deterministic model and share our initial application experience.