* Corresponding Author. Email address: m_farzam88@yahoo.com, Tel: +989177376826 Proposing an Aggregate Production Planning Model by Goal Programming Approach, a Case Study Mansoureh Farzam Rad 1* , Hadi Shirouyehzad 1 (1) Department of Industrial Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran. Copyright 2014 © Mansoureh Farzam Rad and Hadi Shirouyehzad. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Production planning is one of the most important functions in the process of production management. Production planning in the intermediate range of time is termed as “aggregate production planning (APP)”. Aggregate production planning is an important upper level planning activity in a production management system. The present study tries to suggest an aggregate production planning model for products of Hafez tile factory during one year. Due to this fact that the director of the company seeks 3 main objectives to determine the optimal production rate, the linear goal planning method was employed. After solving the problem, in order to examine the efficiency and the distinctiveness of this method in compare to linear programming, the problem was modeled just by considering one objective then was solved by linear programming approach. The findings revealed the goal programming with multi objectives resulted more appropriate solution rather than linear programming with just one objective. Keywords: Goal programming, Aggregate planning, production planning 1 Introduction Production planning is one of the most important functions in the process of production and operation management. In production planning, managers of manufacturing firms need to make crucial decisions on which specific aggregate levels of production, inventory and work force have to be produced to meet possible demands. Such decisions are traditionally interpreted as finding a best combination of the production, inventory and work force quantities that yields a minimum overall cost [1]. Production planning in the intermediate range of time is termed as „aggregate planning ‟. It is thus called because the demand on facilities and available capacities is specified in aggregate quantities. This means that the total demand (excepted) is measured without regard to the product mix that makes up the figure [2]. Aggregate planning is the determination of production rate and the best strategy to meet the demand by considering sales forecasts, production capacity, inventory levels and work force for a medium period, often from 3 to 18 months in advance [3]. The aims of aggregate production planning (APP) are; to set overall production levels for each product category to meet fluctuating or uncertain demand in the near future and to set Journal of Data Envelopment Analysis and Decision Science 2014 (2014) 1-13 Available online at www.ispacs.com/dea Volume: 2014, Year 2014 Article ID: dea-00061, 13 Pages doi:10.5899/2014/dea-00061 Research Article Data Envelopment Analysis and Decision Science