Two-stage tactical planning model for the meat processing industry with divergent production flow

This work presents a two-stage production planning model for the meat processing industry in a divergent production flow with co-production. Besides the decisions about the production, inventory and workforce level at the processing plant, the model also has to take into consideration the decisions regarding livestock production flow and weight ranges in which animals have to be slaughtered. A vertically integrated medium size pork processor is studied in this work. The main challenge in planning is to deal with the divergent flow in attending the demand for the derived pork products with the available raw material (live hogs in diverse weight ranges) at each period and, at the same time, avoid overproduction of low demand products which ends up increasing inventory levels. A mixed integer programming model with a pattern generation program was developed and implemented in a solver and then applied to the company with consistent preliminary result