Decomposing a Multi-Plant, Multi-Item Lot-Sizing Problem with Transfer Costs/Capacities into Facility Location and Flow Sub-Problems

Abstract

This paper describes the way a multi-item, multi-plant Lot-Sizing problem with transfer costs/capacities may be expressed according to the multi-commodity flow formalism, and decomposed into a master Facility Location problem, and a slave minimal cost flow problem. It describes the way this decomposition framework gives rise in a natural way to the design of a heuristic relax/project algorithm, and it ends with numerical experiments.