Production planning with flexible customization using a branch-price-cut method

We consider a production planning problem of an assembly item, where each component of the item has several different versions. In flexible customization, rather than specifying only one version for each component, customers are willing to accept any variation of the product complying with their customization rules. The problem of constructing the final assembly production plan in such a setting is addressed by matching the available machines and other manufacturing resources to meet the demands with flexible customization. A branch-price-cut method to solve this problem without using auxiliary binary variables is developed and computational examples of the implementation of the method are presented.