Purpose: One of the major concerns of production managers is to increase profit by increasing production volumes. In most production units, an increase in production volume is achieved by increasing production capacity. However, in the livestock production units, one can adopt a different policy called "compaction reduction". In this approach, given that the capacity of living production units is often in accordance with a standard volume and the living organism occupies less space at the earlier ages, each breeding period can begin with more living units than capacity, and after a given period, some of them can be slaughtered.
Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a mathematical model for optimizing compaction operations in meat poultry production units so that it is possible to calculate the various variables of the compaction process, such as the appropriate slaughter time and the number of breeding chicks over capacity.
Findings: Computational study shows the efficiency of this approach and increase the volume of production and profit compared to the traditional approach and not utilizing compaction.
Originality/value: Although livestock supply chain and related problems are one of the most important problems in human life, few researchers have focused on them. In this paper poultry farming is considered as one of the most important livestock inventory and a mathematical model is developed to improve total profit.