In today's manufacturing industry, optimization is a tool that is used and that have to be used in order to be competitive. In the optimization problem, the constraints are given and the objective is maximized or minimized. Optimization methods can be used to achieve the best possible or at least a good solution. In the production, optimization is usually used in the decision making phase, in the long-term production planning, that solves the problems like investment decision, places of factories and number of employees.

However, although the research has been quite active past decades, optimization techniques are not used for medium and short-term planning in practice. The main problems there are the dynamic situation and high number of parameters. The practice appears to lean on the common view decision making, best practices and very simplified, locally determined ruled, like the EDD priority rule that weight the production of the products those deadline is the first. Although the simple rules can be very effective in terms of operating and applying speed, there is still room for further improvements. Advancements in the information technology, computers and mature ERP systems has also made it possible to on the other hand apply optimization to more complex systems and on the another hand apply optimization faster using even real-time information.

In this project, we apply online optimization mainly for short-term planning. It is a field, where optimization using real-time information is promising, as the information is indeed real-time and it is changing very often. Short-term planning typically is a daily operation and it can include control and scheduling of the process. Short-term planning has to handle exceptions, like machine breakdowns and variances like human factors and large processing times. These things can occur in many phases of the production, e.g. order handling, production and shipment. In addition, if we consider even demand, the changes in the short-term demand can be very large. All of these are very hard to see beforehand.