Optimization of material requirements planning and master production scheduling using quantum annealing: A novel approach for faster and more flexible manufacturing

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jan C. Aurich
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 575464988

To maintain the competitiveness of manufacturing companies, it is necessary to respond quickly and reliably to sudden changes in the market environment, such as altered customer demand, material shortages, or supply chain disruptions. This requires approaches for managing these influences that ensure the economic efficiency of production system operations. In this context, the potential of dynamic production planning with integrated master production scheduling and material requirements planning becomes evident. The integrated consideration of these planning steps enables rescheduling within the production program based on material availability and, complementarily, a customer- and capacity-oriented material requirements planning with high responsiveness. The multitude of factors that must be considered results in a complex optimization problem that must be addressed within the production planning process. Conventional methods reach their limits in terms of computational time and solution quality, especially under high problem complexity. As a result, the flexibility and economic efficiency of production are impeded by long planning intervals and limited update capability. Quantum annealing allows analytical multi-objective optimization problems to be solved within seconds or sub-seconds, regardless of problem size. Thus, quantum annealing offers the potential to realize dynamic production planning through the integration of master production scheduling and material requirements planning. However, this potential has not yet been scientifically explored in detail within this context. The proposed project addresses the investigation of this potential. For this purpose, various types of production systems will be analyzed in terms of their constraints and objectives in production planning, and modeling and calculation will be investigated as a quantum annealing-compatible optimization problem. In addition, a comparative evaluation with conventional methods is conducted, and the developed approach is implemented in a software demonstrator for future applications.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants