An Optimal Strategy for Maintaining Excess Capacity

Abstract

Boeing is a manufacturing industry with very low production volumes of very large units. As such, they experience huge fluctuations in demand. A standard inventory model dictates massive changes in production capacity as demand varies. However all such models assume a continuous production stream. In this report we investigate the following question whether such a model is sensible in a problem of such large scale granularity. We describe a combination of stochastic, financial and simulation models to model the production of airplanes. A preliminary simulation of the model is also presented.