1. ¹Kanagawa University, Japan
2. ²Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Japan

Correspondence: H. Matsuura, Department of International Business and Management, School of Business Administration, Kanagawa University, 2946 Tsuchiya Hiratsuka-City, Kanagawa 259-12, Japan.

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of determining planned leadtimes in a periodic loading system, such as 'Material Requirements Planning.' A method for determining planned leadtime for an individual job, based upon the operation time for the job, is presented from the standpoint that the planned leadtime should be determined under a management policy, taking a trade off between work-in-process quantities and capacity requirements variations into consideration. The proposed method, which is derived with Lagrange's method of indeterminate coefficients, can minimize capacity requirements variations under a given average loading time, under general operation time distributions.