BAD 84012 – Scheduling and Planning

Department of Management and Information Systems                                                                                        Kent State University                                                                                                                                   Spring 2013

Instructor                                                                                                                                                Dr. Al Guiffrida                                                                                                                                     Office:               A-411 Business Administration Building                                                                     Office Hours:    Monday 2:00 – 6:00; and by appointment                                                Telephone:        (716) 954-3504                                                                                                                    E-mail:                aguiffri@kent.edu

Course Objectives                                                                                                                               Our course is a doctoral seminar on scheduling and planning models that are used in operations and production management. The goal is to expose you to a portfolio of scheduling and planning models that will help you form a foundation upon which you can build your doctoral research program in operations management. Specifically the course is designed to:

1) To introduce students to the classic scheduling and production planning models and methodologies that have been reported in the literature.

2) To help students enhance their quantitative modeling skills through the detailed study of underlying mathematics and theoretical structures of selected scheduling and planning models.

3) To stimulate research ideas in scheduling and planning models that will lead to the development of a research program for your doctoral research.

The above skill based will be accomplished using formal lectures by the course instructor, mini-lectures presented by students enrolled in the class and discussion of readings selected from the literature.

Course Notes and Textbook

Textbook: there is no required textbook.

A collection of articles (in PDF format) will be posted to Blackboard for student use.

Class lecture slides (power point) notes prepared by the Instructor will be distributed in hardcopy and/or electronic form throughout the course.

Course Prerequisites and Enrollment Requirements                                                  Doctoral Standing in the KSU School of Business

Enrollment/Withdrawal: Students have responsibility to ensure they are properly enrolled in classes.  You are advised to review your official class schedule (using Student Tools/Flashfast) during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure you are properly enrolled in this class and section.  Should you find an error in your class schedule, you have until Sunday January 27, 2013 to correct the error in your class schedule. If registration errors are not corrected by this date and you continue to attend and participate in classes for which you are not officially enrolled, you are advised now that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester for any class in which you are not properly registered.

For the Spring 2013 semester, the course withdrawal deadline is Sunday, March 24, 2013. Withdrawal before the deadline results in a “W” on the official transcript; after the deadline a grade must be calculated and reported.

Academic Integrity                                                                                                          We will follow the University Policy on Academic Integrity.  Academic honesty: Cheating means to misrepresent the source, nature, or other conditions of your academic work (e.g., tests, quizzes, papers, projects, homework assignments) so as to get undeserved credit. The use of intellectual property of others without giving them appropriate credit is a serious academic offence. It is the University’s policy that cheating or plagiarism result in receiving a failing grade (0 points) for the work or course. Repeat offences may result in dismissal from the University.

Students with Disabilities

University policy 3342-3-18 requires that students with disabilities be provided reasonable accommodations to ensure their equal access to course content.  If you have a documented disability and require accommodations, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester to make arrangements for necessary classroom adjustments.  Please note, you must first verify your eligibility for these through the Student Accessibility Services (contact 330-672-3391 or visit www.kent.edu/sas for more information on registration procedures).

Grading Policy                                                                                                         The grades for the course will be based on class participation, paper reviews, and a final student research paper. The weighting for each component will be as follows:

Class Participation                               20%

Paper Reviews and Presentation          40%

Final Paper                                           40%

Class Participation will be evaluated based on the extent to which each student contributes meaningful comments to class discussion. Problems will be assigned to students to solve and present during class meetings. 

Paper Reviews will be graded based on extent to which the presenter has attempted to understand and explain their assigned paper from the literature. Each student will be assigned 6-8 papers to present to the class.

The Final Paper is intended for the student to explore a course topic in more detail. The goal of the Final Paper is to prepare original research paper that would be at a minimum presentable at the level of a refereed national conference.

Course Topics

1. Aggregate Planning

a) Linear Decision Rules

b) Mathematical Programming and Hierarchal Planning Models

c) Heuristics Methods (Management Coefficients; Parametric Programming)

d) Search Decision Rules  

e) Learning-based Models

2. Independent Demand: Multistage and Joint Economic Lot Sizing Models

3. Dependent Demand: MRP and Lot Sizing Models

4. Scheduling Models