Production Planning With Fuzzy Linear Programming Approach

Borders among countries have been removed and the competition among enterprises has dramatically increased with the globalization process that has been taking place since the last period of the 20’th century. In order to survive and become successful, this present process requires enterprises to have effective production planning, especially for those engaging in production with order in advance. One possible way of effective production planning is linear programming. It is necessary that data must be of an exact kind in order to be used in linear programming which is a mathematical method. But in real life, it is not possible to know or determine the exact data (such as the amount of demand for a product, the amount of raw materials used in production, price and etc.) in advance. Therefore, fuzzy linear programming models are suggested for such fuzzy cases that exact data is unknown With the production capacity of 600 000 tons of tomato paste annually, Turkey, after USA and Italy, is the third largest production country in the world and the second one in Europe. As it is known, the main source in the production process of tomato paste is tomatoes and those appropriate kinds of tomatoes are grown at certain times in a year. In this sense, it is a must for the firms dealing with tomato paste business to plan and schedule carefully the amounts and times of purchasing and processing of raw materials, amounts of production. Moreover, the amount of the sources for a kg tomatoes source like tomatoes, energy, labor etc. are fuzzy. In this study, a production planning is made with using fuzzy linear programming by analyzing the production process of an example firm dealing with tomato paste, located in Bursa.