Robust order promising

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the development of a planning approach for supporting robust order promising. A high level of reliability from the customer’s and the company’s point of view (i.e. planning robustness and solution robustness) is to be achieved despite occurring uncertainty. In the literature, capable-to-promise (CTP) approaches are suggested to determine answers to customer inquiries taking into ac-count resource availability. Thereby, attempts are made to cover order- and resource-related uncertainty by means of robustness-generating measures. However, interactions between these measures as well as customer responses to proposed order specifications are not adequately taken into account. In order to cope with these issues, a hierarchical procedure for analyzing and coordinating robustness-generating measures is developed in this cumulative dissertation. In accordance with the operative character of order promising, the first two papers deal with the development of a CTP model which considers customer behavior as well as established robustness-generating measures. Due to the complexity of identified measure interactions, coor-dinating the robustness-generating measures with respect to profitability, as well as planning robustness and solution robustness is inevitable. Thus, in the third paper, parameter values of the measures are coordinated by means of a statistically-founded procedure and a limited multi-criteria search. The test results finally reveal that the developed procedure leads to highly efficient solutions.