This paper examines the inventories of publicly traded American manufacturing companies between 1981 and 2000. The median of inventory holding periods were reduced from 96 days to 81 days. The average rate of inventory reduction is about 2% per year. The greatest reduction was found for...

A quadratic model for production-inventory planning was made famous by Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon in 1960 in [3], especially for its application to a paint factory. A discrete control version of a related quadratic production-inventory model was studied by Kleindorfer, Kriebel, Thompson,...

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...

Cyclical scheduling, where the time between production periods for each item is constant, offers simplicity and ease of control compared with noncyclical scheduling, where production periods are irregularly spaced. However, when demands are dynamic, flexibility in the spacing of production...

Industrial lotsizing and scheduling pose very difficult analytical problems. We propose an unconventional model that deals with sequence-dependent setup costs in a multiple-machine environment. The sequence-splitting model splits an entire schedule into subsequences, leading to tractable...

Two major contributions are made to the problem of resource allocation to indivisible projects with uncertain outcomes: the concepts of preferential independence and utility independence for the space of discrete projects are defined, and a multiattribute utility theory is linked with...

We present a greedy heuristic for the n job/1 machine scheduling problem with precedence constraints. This method is useful whenever the manager's optimization criteria is the sum of weighted or unweighted completion times, the sum of weighted or unweighted flow times, (with or without release...