Abstract

Composite wind turbine blades are major components of wind towers and they constitute a significant proportion of the cost of building wind towers. It has been a common practice that wind turbine blade manufacturing companies extend production to multiple sites. This thesis will apply an integrated production planning model to multi-site composite wind turbine blade manufacturing for improved operations performance and minimized supply chain cost. The model is formulated by mixed integer linear programming (MILP) and contains three modules: raw material inventory module, production module and finished product distribution module. It covers the operations of a whole supply chain including raw materials procurement and inventory control, production planning, manpower planning, finished products warehousing and transportation. A numerical example is given to illustrate the model and to examine computational efficiency of it. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to identify important cost factors and to provide directions for managerial operations in cost reduction. Key words: composite, wind turbine blades, multi-site, production planning, supply chain cost, MILP, cost reduction