During the past years the market demand and the consequential competition have forced enterprises of the production industry to choose strategies that focus on both product differentiation and cost leadership. Due to this development the importance of efficient production processes has increased immensely. The objective of this doctoral thesis is to find answers to research questions that deal with the optimization of logistic objective criterions by using production planning techniques. Furthermore this thesis focuses on enterprises of the process industry since they have been paid little attention in literature so far. This is due to the fact that these production systems show very complex structures and a high heterogeneity in the production program. In order to give answers to the research questions a concept for optimizing the logistic performance of production systems is introduced. This concept is based on the regulation principle of cybernetics and the main idea is that a primary logistic objective criterion has to be chosen and optimized before measures to improve the other logistic performances of the production system can be developed. Therefore an instrument for evaluating the effects of optimizing measures on logistic objective criterions is presented. Furthermore an algorithm is developed which represents a general instruction for the machine scheduling problem in the process industry. The application of the concept is illustrated on a real-world problem of the steel industry.