Multi-period production planning with product specification flexibility

We consider a manufacturer that has flexibility in meeting its demands, i.e., each of its customers specifies a range of demands, and will accept product quantities within that range. We will focus on a manufacturer inventory strategy in which only end products are stored; however, our models and algorithms can be extended to allow for alternative inventory strategies. We propose a greedy heuristic with an associated improvement algorithm, as well as an exact branch-and-price algorithm. In addition, we analyze and develop efficient heuristic and exact approaches for a subproblem that needs to be solved repeatedly in the latter.

Multi-period production planning with product specification flexibility Conference Paper