Subcontracting has become a prominent business practice across many industries. Subcontracting of industrial production is generally based on short-term need for additional processing capacity, and is oftentimes employed by manufacturers to process customer orders more quickly than using only...

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Master Planning and Scheduling as Part of Enterprise Planning Systems -- Who Should Understand Master Planning and Scheduling? -- How This Book Is Organized -- Initial Thoughts -- The A's to Z's...

The second part of the thesis focuses on a different stochastic problem of finding the optimal hedging points in a manufacturing flow control system. Our simulation-based method allows solving large scale systems that are considered very difficult to solve by current standards in the literature.