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,...

We examine the problem of developing supply contracts that encourage proper coordination of forecast information and production decisions between a manufacturer and distributor of high fashion, seasonal products operating in a two-mode production environment. The first production mode is...

We consider an integrated job-shop planning and scheduling model. To solve the problem we use a (multi-pass) decomposition approach which alternates between solving a planning problem with a fixed sequence of products on the machines, and a job-shop scheduling problem for a fixed choice of the...

Based on research on the polyhedral structure of lot-sizing models over the last 20 years, we claim that there is a nontrivial fraction of practical lot-sizing problems that can now be solved by nonspecialists just by taking an appropriate a priori reformulation of the problem, and then feeding...

Salespeople are the eyes and ears of the firms they serve. They possess market knowledge that is critical for a wide range of decisions. A key question is how a firm can provide incentives to its salesforce so that it is in their interest to truthfully disclose their information about the market...

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 discuss an approximation scheme for the multi-item lot size problem. It is based on an optimal basic solution of a linear programming problem derived from the original problem. The approximate solution is obtained by taking a linear convex combination of the optimal solution of the linear...

For an uncertain production system, the rule that controls the flow of material relies on parameters, such as the yield rates and the demand rate. These parameters are estimates, and they are usually inaccurate. In this paper, we analyze a type of "pull" rule called a proportional restoration...

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...

Motivated by an aggregate production-planning problem in an actual global manufacturing network, we examine the impact of exchange-rate uncertainty on the choice of optimal production policies when the allocation decision can be deferred until the realization of exchange rates. This leads to the...