Abstract
This paper presents an integrated analysis of production and financing decisions. We assume that a cash storage unit is installed to manage the cash flows related with production activities such as raw material procurement, process operating setup, Inventory holding cost and finished product sales. Temporarily financial investments are allowed for more profit. The production plant is modeled by the Batch-Storage Network with Recycle Streams in Yi and Reklaitis (2003). The objective function of the optimization is minimizing the opportunity costs of annualized capital investment and cash/material inventory while maximizing stockholder's benefit. No depletion of all the material and cash storage units is major constraints of the optimization. A novel production and inventory analysis formulation, the PSW(Periodic Square Wave) model, provides useful expressions for the upper/lower bounds and average level of the cash and material inventory holdups. The expressions for the Kuhn-Tucker conditions of the optimization problem can be reduced to two subproblems and analytical lot sizing equations under a mild assumption about the cash flow pattern of stockholder's dividend. The first subproblem is a separable concave minimization network flow problem whose solution yields the average material flow rates through the networks. The second subproblem determines the decisions about financial Investment. Finally, production and financial transaction lot sizes and startup times can be determined by analytical expressions as far as the average flow rates are calculated. The optimal production lot and storage sizes considering financial factors are smaller than those without such consideration. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the results obtainable using this approach.