Delayed differentiation or postponement is widely advocated to mitigate conflicts between product diversity and inventory cost savings. Manufacturers practicing postponement often suffer from severely constrained finishing capacities and noticeable finishing lead times. Therefore, inventories...

In this paper we develop a new conditional penalty for the fixed charge transportation problem. This penalty is stronger than both the Driebeek penalties and the Lagrangean penalties of Cabot and Erenguc. Computational testing shows that the use of these penalties leads to significant reductions...