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A computational analysis of lower bounds for big bucket production planning problems

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Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a variety of approaches to obtain lower bounds for multi-level production planning problems with big bucket capacities, i.e., problems in which multiple items compete for the same resources. We give an extensive survey of both known and new methods, and also establish relationships between some of these methods that, to our knowledge, have not been presented before. As will be highlighted, understanding the substructures of difficult problems provide crucial insights on why these problems are hard to solve, and this is addressed by a thorough analysis in the paper. We conclude with computational results on a variety of widely used test sets, and a discussion of future research.

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  1. Personal communication.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments that helped us to improve the presentation of the paper. The research carried out was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant No. DMI 0323299.

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Correspondence to Kerem Akartunalı.

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Akartunalı, K., Miller, A.J. A computational analysis of lower bounds for big bucket production planning problems. Comput Optim Appl 53, 729–753 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10589-012-9465-z

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