Growing interest in designing systems with capacity slack as one form of flexibility raises many questions about its use and its usefulness. In the framework of the economic lot scheduling problem with stochastic demand, we develop on optimization-based model that considers capacity slack,...

Material Requirements Planning or Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems originally were designed for a deterministic environment. Often, however, demand for finished products is uncertain and some type of buffering mechanism is necessary to provide desired levels of service. When the...

We consider the problem of setting prices and choosing production quantities for a single product over a finite horizon for a capacity-constrained manufacturer facing price-sensitive demands. There is a fixed cost per production run and a variable cost per unit produced, both of which may vary...

We consider a problem faced by a contract assembler that both assembles finished goods and procures the associated component parts for one of its major customers. Because of rapid changes in technology and ongoing engineering changes, all parts subject to obsolescence are purchased only for the...