Flexible Mixed-Integer Programming Formulations for Production Scheduling Problems

Abstract We present an approach to modeling practical dynamic production planning problems with product sequencing considerations that yields a significant reduction in the number of required binary variables over traditional approaches and improves the structure of special ordered sets which can be exploited in state-of-the-art mixed integer programming codes. In addition, the variable definition enables the modeler to develop a wide variety of objective functions, thus facilitating model development and interpretation.