Patent ID: 8666516

Claim:
A production planning system for allocating production capacity to meet a demand, the production planning system comprising: an operational processor configured to receive demand inputs, calculate a consolidated demand based on the demand inputs, calculate and store a production capacity, and create an operational production plan by allocating production capacity to meet the consolidated demand based on the consolidated demand and the production capacity, wherein the demand inputs include temporal requirement data that sets a deadline by which the demand input must be produced; and a simulating processor, the simulating processor comprising: a data retriever configured to retrieve and store consolidated demand and capacity data from the operational processor; a simulated data handler configured to receive a simulated demand input and create a simulated consolidated demand by adding the simulated demand input to the retrieved consolidated demand, the simulated demand input including temporal requirement data that sets a deadline by which the simulated demand input must be produced; and a simulating planner configured to create a simulated production plan by allocating production capacity to meet the simulated consolidated demand based on the simulated consolidated demand and the capacity data retrieved from the operational processor by the data retriever, wherein the simulated production plan has a simulated short-range production sub-plan to satisfy demands from the simulated consolidated demand having temporal requirement data within a predetermined time period, and a simulated long-range production sub-plan to satisfy demands from the simulated consolidated demand having temporal requirement data outside of the predetermined time period.