In the American economy practically no penalty for fluctuations in placing orders is incurred by the ordering company, even though such fluctuations are costly to manufacturers and to the economy as a whole. In particular, dynamic pricing by suppliers, which would communicate information on...

In this paper the authors present an interpretive discussion of the scope for management scientists to make a more effective contribution to improving the performance of the Canadian economy, by active involvement in management and decision making in Canadian institutions, both private and...

A general mathematical model is formulated for the problem of scheduling production quantities for a group of products with seasonal stochastic demand through a common production facility. It is assumed that revised forecasts of total demand over the season for each product become available as...

Management Science is not unique to any particular country or set of countries. It is comprised of processes, techniques and tools that are potentially applicable to problems found in a wide range of social and economic systems. The scope and style of management science practices vary from...

Many manufacturing firms produce component parts both for assembly into new products and to meet orders for spare parts. An inventory model for this situation would involve two types of demands: probabilistic demand as spares and deterministic (or scheduled) withdrawals as components for...

In this paper we present a heuristic method, based on Lagrangian relaxation, for multilevel lot-sizing when there is a single bottleneck facility. A series of Lagrangian relaxations (one for each item in the product structure) is imbedded in a branch and bound procedure. The objective is to find...

In this Note we present an alternative formulation to the MRP lot sizing model of Steinberg and Napier (SN) (Steinberg, E., H. A. Napier. 1980. Optimal multi-level lot sizing for requirements planning systems. Management Sci. 26 (2) 1258--1271.). The alternative is more parsimonious and the...

In this Note, we address the issue of safety stock considerations in an MRP environment through the use of a single identical component as a replacement for a set of multiple components. We indicate where the results reported by Collier (Collier, David A. 1982. Aggregate safety stock levels and...

Customer service has assumed strategic importance in most manufacturing environments. Corporate reputations often depend on how reliably promised lead times are met. A goal of filling orders within a service window of T time units is often encountered in practice. This goal ignores the...

This paper introduces a line of research on capacity-constrained multi-stage production scheduling problems. The first section introduces the problem area as it arises from a failure of MRP systems. Then a review of the literature and an analysis of the type of problems that exist are presented...