كليدواژه :
steel slab matching , material flow , polynomial formulation , minimum cost flow
چكيده لاتين :
Customer order decoupling point
plays a very important role in material flow
through the supply chains. In this point, materials
are assigned to customer orders. Material
allocation problem in customer order decoupling
point has gained increasing attention in recent
years. According to the literature, the most popular
decoupling point in the steel industry is located at
the slab stock yard. This paper studies this
widespread material allocation problem in the steel
industry in which steel slabs are assigned to
customer orders. For the first time, material flow
targets gained from the aggregate planning
module, order due-dates, and slab mismatching
penalties are considered simultaneously. An
integer programming formulation (IP for short) is
developed for the problem. Because of large
dimensionality of the real world problems in the
steel industry, general optimization algorithms
(like branch and bound) cannot solve the IP
problem in a reasonable time. So, a minimum cost
flow network formulation is developed for the
problem. Hence, the problem can be solved in
polynomial time with any of the existing algorithms
for the minimum cost flow problem. This is of
significant importance, since the slab matching
problem is performed typically daily. Hence, the
running time of the algorithm should be around a
few minutes.
