Article ID: | iaor2004972 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 29 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 167 |
End Page Number: | 179 |
Publication Date: | Feb 1997 |
Journal: | IIE Transactions |
Authors: | Palekar Udatta S., Stowers Curtis L. |
Keywords: | programming: integer |
We address the problem of coordinated replenishment of products when the products can be produced only in fixed proportion to each other. Such problems commonly arise in the manufacture of sheet/plate metal parts or die-cast parts. The problem is a variant of the well-known Joint Replenishment Problem. We call this problem the Strong Interaction Problem. After giving a mathematical formulation of the problem, we show that the general problem is NP-hard. An important variant of the problem, in which products are unique to a family, is shown to be polynomially solvable. We present several lower bounds, an exact algorithm and a heuristic for the problem. Computational testing on randomly generated problems suggests that our exact algorithm performs very well when compared with a commercially available integer programming solver. The heuristic method also gives good solutions.