Reducing manufacturing lead times and minimizing work-in-process (WIP) inventories are the cornerstones of popular manufacturing strategies such as Lean, Quick Response, and Just-in-Time Manufacturing. In this paper, we present a model that captures the relationshipbetween facility layout and...

Since procedures for producing optimal solutions to a quadratic assignment problem are computationally infeasible for any but small problems, heuristic techniques for producing approximate solutions must be employed for the solution of real practical problems. This paper presents the results of...

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...

The branch and bound principle has long been established as an effective computational tool for solving mixed integer linear programming problems. This paper investigates the computational feasibility of branch and bound methods in solving convex nonlinear integer programming problems. The...

This paper presents an algorithm for efficiently sequencing the cutting operations associated with the manufacture of discrete parts on a CNC machine. The problem is first modeled as an integer program but recast via Lagrangian relaxation as a min-cut problem on a bipartite network. Tight lower...

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...