Fuzzy demand-driven material requirements planning: a comprehensive analysis of fuzzy logic implementation in DDMRP

Demand-Driven Material Requirements Planning (DDMRP) is a new method of inventory control designed to address the challenges of today's complex and volatile supply chain environment. DDMRP replaces traditional Material Requirements Planning (MRP) with a more agile and responsive approach that is based on a set of colour-coded buffers. DDMRP ensures that the right inventory is in the right place at the right time, enabling companies to respond quickly and effectively to changing customer demand. DDMRP requires the setting of various parameters, such as variability factor (VF) and lead time factor (LTF), which can have a significant impact on systems’ performance. Pre-assumed fixed values of DDMRP parameters are used in most of the existing studies. This may lead to either high stockout levels or excess inventory especially in environments involving high level of variability. In this study, we proposed a fuzzy logic-based approach which dynamically adjusts the values of VF and LTF parameters considering demand and lead time variability. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was investigated by comparing its performance with DDMRP based on several numerical experiments. The results showed that the proposed Fuzzy Demand-Driven Material Requirements Planning (FDDMRP) outperforms DDMRP in terms of backorder rate and total cost.