Decision support system for lumber procurement and dry kiln scheduling

Furniture producers are implementing small-lot, rapid-response production policies. In this environment, determining the optimal timing and mix of lumber purchases, controlling lumber inventory levels, achieving high kiln utilization, and satisfying demands for dried lumber in a timely fashion is more difficult. To address this problem, a lumber procurement and kiln scheduling decision support system has been developed. Dry kiln scheduling is modeled as a set of n independent and non-preemptive jobs processed on m non-identical, parallel machines (kilns) with the objective of minimizing the total weighted tardiness of lumber demands. Since optimal solutions are difficult to obtain and may not meet all the due dates, heuristic algorithms have been developed to generate efficient lumber demand/kiln assignment sequences in a multi-period planning environment.