The increasing cost of health care has brought pressure to reduce pharmaceutical costs, and because manufacturing and R&D are significant cost factors, these areas have been targeted as potential sources of cost reduction. Manufacturing costs are particularly high in the biotechnology industry...

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...

We consider two classes of multi-item lot-sizing problems. The first is a class of single stage problems involving joint machine capacity constraints and/or start up costs, and the second is a class of multistage problems with general product structure. The problems are solved as mixed integer...

This paper develops a "perfect planning horizon procedure" for the simple cash balance problem, where the objective of the firm is to schedule the selling and buying of its earning assets so that all the positive demands are met at minimum cost. Demand for cash can be both positive or negative; a...

Economic lot sizing and batching models often assume reliable manufacturing facilities. In this research, we focus on the effects of machine breakdowns and corrective maintenance on the economic lot sizing decisions. Two production control policies are proposed for coping with these stochastic...