The Surplus Inventory Matching Problem in the Process Industry

Jayant R. Kalagnanam (), Milind W. Dawande (), Mark Trumbo () and Ho Soo Lee ()
Additional contact information
Jayant R. Kalagnanam: International Business Machines, T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
Milind W. Dawande: International Business Machines, T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
Mark Trumbo: International Business Machines, T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
Ho Soo Lee: International Business Machines, T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

Operations Research, 2000, vol. 48, issue 4, 505-516

Abstract: We introduce a new problem that arises from operations planning in the process industry. This problem involves matching an order book against surplus inventory before production planning. It can be formulated by generalizing the multiple knapsack problem along three dimensions: (i) adding assignment restrictions on items that can be assigned to a knapsack, (ii) adding a new attribute (called “color” in this paper) to an item and then adding the associated “color” constraints that restrict the number of distinct colors that can be assigned to a knapsack, and (iii) considering multiple objectives for optimization. We formulate the problem, provide a result regarding its complexity, and report on our computational experience with solving a set of real instances based on data from the operations of a large steel plant. We then propose a network-flow---based heuristic that yields solutions within 3% of optimal (or the best known feasible solution). This system has been successfully deployed and is now used daily in the mill operations.

Keywords: Production/scheduling: applications; planning; approximations/heuristics; Inventory/production: approximations/heuristics; applications; Industry; mining; metals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.48.4.505.12425 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:48:y:2000:i:4:p:505-516

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().