Rigidity Evaluation under Uncertainties for Multiple Investment Alternatives over Multiple Periods

Abstract

Abstract. In today's uncertain economic environment, the evaluation of safety for investment alternatives is of practical importance in manufacturing companies. This paper examines a method of quantitatively evaluating profitability and risk for multiple alternatives using the total-cost unit-cost domain. The paper assumes such factors as unit sales price, sales and production volume, unit variable cost, fixed cost, and yield for each alternative. The paper incorporates the relationship between production capacity and demand, distinguishing between cases of production capacity surplus and shortage for each year over the entire planning horizon. The paper investigates the case in which the values of each factor independently move in the direction of decreasing profit each year, and clarifies the procedure of comparing safety among multiple investment alternatives on a single consolidated total-cost unit-cost domain. The difficulty of the problem lies in the method of consolidating multiple total-cost unit-cost domains into a single domain since the combination of years of capacity surplus and shortage depends upon the change values in each factor under consideration. A systematic method of evaluating profitability as well as risk is presented, and the validity of the proposed method is verified using a numerical example.