Flexible capacity has been shown to be very effective to hedge against forecast errors at the investment stage. In a make-to-order environment, this flexibility can also be used to hedge against variability in customer orders in the short term. For that purpose, production levels must be...

In this paper, we focus on a useful modeling concept that is frequently ignored while formu lating discrete optimization problems. Very often, there exists a natural symmetry inherent in the problem itself that, if propagated to the model, can hopelessly mire a branch-and-bound solver by...