Presents an analytic framework for processing planning in industries where fixed batch sizes are common. The overall optimum processing plan is shown to be located on an envelope between the optimum JIT plan and the optimum level plan. These concepts provide the framework for understanding the...

In today’s competitive global economy, the focus is on faster delivery of small more frequent orders of inventory at a lower total cost. This often precludes the use of full pallet picking in warehouses so firms commonly use manual picking of cases and broken‐cases. Many firms increase the...

In this paper we report the development and implementation of a decision support system to solve a complex scheduling system for a major apparel fabric company with annual sales of more than $2.5 billion. For the first phase of the problem, we developed a linear programming model to generate...

The performance of Ardalan′s heuristic is compared with that of Teitz and Bart for the location of service facilities, where performance is assessed in terms of the accuracy of solutions. The comparison is made considering two kinds of location problem: p ‐median and p ‐median with maximum...

In a recent article, A. Ardalan presented a heuristic for service facility location. This heuristic is the Add heuristic of Kuehn and Hamburger, originally applied to warehouse location. Extensive results are known about the theoretical and practical performance of this heuristic, which applies...

Addresses a deterministic maintenance‐scheduling problem for a group of on‐identical machines. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer on‐linear program which is approached heuristically. In the model formulation, it is assumed that a major overhaul brings the machine back to its new...

A fast production scheduling system, the very fast scheduler (VFS), has been developed by the authors. It creates a capacity constrained production schedule within one minute of elapsed time for problems of a size encountered in industry. The quality of the schedules is comparable with the best...

Labour scheduling heuristic methods have been applied in service operating environments using both actual and synthetic demand patterns. Two important characteristics of these demand patterns are (1) demand smoothness and (2) mean demand. Investigates the effects of demand smoothness and mean...

Proposes a heuristic iterative scheduling algorithm for the resource constrained project scheduling problem. Considers a general model where activities are represented by multiple operating modes and each operating mode is constituted of different activity durations and resource requirements....

Presents a hierarchical production planning (HPP) model that integrates aggregate‐type planning, family disaggregate planning, lot‐sizing, job scheduling and evaluation of the final production plans into a complete planning and scheduling system. In‐corporation of a simple heuristic...