Consider a plant that has information about the arrival schedule of its "inputs" over a planning cycle. The plant has parallel production lines for processing multiple types of products. However, changeover cost and changeover time are incurred when a line changes from processing one type of...

Firms that build flexibility into their manufacturing system gain a competitive edge from their ability to efficiently produce a mid-variety of products at mid-volumes. In order to realize the competitive edge of flexible systems, manufacturing management has to deal effectively with the greater...

For the last four decades the preferred economic philosophy in much of Latin America was that of import-substituting industrialization. As a result multinational corporations (MNCs) approached different countries with the expectation that each plant would primarily serve its domestic market....

We study the structure of the optimal policies for a firm operating plants in different countries. The relative costs of production between the plants are assumed to vary over time due to economic and political factors such as exchange rates, inflation, taxes, and tariffs. Based on the costs,...

The purpose of this paper is to describe TABUROUTE, a new tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with capacity and route length restrictions. The algorithm considers a sequence of adjacent solutions obtained by repeatedly removing a vertex from its current route and reinserting it...