Motivated by a problem faced by a large manufacturer of a consumer product, we explore the interaction between production planning and capacity acquisition decisions in environments with demand growth. We study a firm producing multiple items in a multiperiod environment where demand for items...

We derive a sharp upper bound on the minimal forecast horizon in the discounted dynamic lot size model with constant initial demand. This bound is given by m(m 1), where m is the EOQ's worth, i.e., the number of periods for which the total demand equals Economic Order Quantity. Our results do...

We report the solution to optimality of ten large-scale symmetric travelling salesman problems. The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the standard problems of the Operations Research/Management Science literature and is cited in virtually every textbook on this subject. The TSP is a...

This paper describes a branch and bound approach for optimizing a media selection problem, namely, to choose the best set of mailing lists to maximize audience reach. Prompted by a national retailer's interest in more effective and efficient direct mail catalogue distribution, the algorithm...

Many algorithms have been developed for the optimal solution of the asymmetric travelling salesman problem: the most efficient ones are based on the subtour elimination approach. This paper presents a breadth-first branch and bound algorithm which differs from the method of Smith, Srinivasan and...

Numerous methods have been proposed for solution of the simple assembly line balancing (SALB) problem. This paper describes a branch and bound algorithm which in many cases is faster than the well-known Hoffmann heuristic technique to which it is related. It introduces a simple bounding rule...

Recent approaches to modeling the client's payment-scheduling problem allow the client to control both the timing of payments and the completion times of activities. In practice, the activity schedule is typically determined by the contractor rather than the client. This paper addresses this...

The conventional approach to the assembly line balancing problem assumes that the manufacturing methods to be used have been predetermined. However, in practice the design engineer has several alternatives available in the choice of processing, typically involving a trade-off between labor or...