An economic production quantity problem with backorders and fuzzy cycle times

Optimization models combining Economic Production Quantity models and fuzzy set theory are important to the process industry as they are capable of modeling the numerous uncertainties inherent in this context. In this paper, we incorporate backorders (i.e the inventory to go below zero) in a fuzzy Economic Production Quantity (EPQ) model. The uncertainties in the backorders for different products are modeled using triangular possibility distributions. We present an example describing a typical decision making problem in the paper industry to illustrate our model.