Tactical resource allocation for efficient capacity Utilization

Research Project, 2017 – 2023

Aerospace industry is expected to grow, but the competition is strong, resulting in shrinking margins and an increasing demand for flexibility. The ability to efficiently use the company’s production system - while volumes and product mix changes - will be crucial to reach high resource utilization without sacrificing service levels and turnover rates. Moreover, aerospace has unique requirements on technical precision that have to be combined with rigid measures for quality assurance, so the task of ensuring cost-effective manufacturing is challenging.

Tactical resource allocation, i.e., the process to allocate processing operations to production resources while performing resource and capacity planning, has therefore been identified as an important success factor in maximizing resource utilization while ensuring efficient production flows in the long-term. This type of tactical planning is vital to production systems for low volume production, as is the case within the aviation industry. Today, this planning is made experience-based and without method support.

Few academic studies have focused on this kind of tactical planning, making it difficult to know what data is required and how the planning models and algorithms should be designed to best match the aerospace industry's requirements. Hence, there is a need for theory development regarding the design and use of models and methods for this type of capacity planning, which is the purpose of the project.