Material Planning with Goal Programming in MATLAB
Material Requirement Planning (MRP) is an important part of production management because it ensures the timely availability of materials while reducing costs and surplus inventory. This study introduces a Goal Programming (GP)-based optimization model for material planning in a furniture manufacturing company that produces three product types: dining tables, folding chairs, and fittings. The suggested methodology combines MRP concepts with preemptive multi-objective optimization to address common challenges in the manufacturing process and ultimately to reduce production costs, inventory holding costs, and expenses related to resource idle time and overtime. The mathematical formulation is built on a preemptive priority structure and solved using two computing approaches: Microsoft Excel Solver for baseline linear programming cost minimization and MATLAB's goal attain function for multi-objective goal programming. The suggested model achieves zero excess in priority production goals while keeping total production costs at 10.3% of the LP-derived optimum. The combination of MRP and Goal Programming is demonstrated to provide a practical, scalable, and computationally efficient decision-support framework for production managers in small and medium-sized manufacturing industries, outperforming conventional single-objective planning approaches reported in the literature.