Abstract
This paper considers the problem of coordinated ordering of items having deterministic but time-varying demands where there is a common ordering cost if one or more of these items are ordered in addition to individual items ordering costs. Two new integer linear-programming formulations are presented and compared with the classical formulation. Several well-known heuristics are described and a new improvement procedure is proposed. The relative performance of these heuristics is assessed. Results show the superiority of the new formulations and of the new improvement procedure.
Acknowledgement
Research was partially supported by Grants OPG0036509, OPG0039682 and OPG0172633 from the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council. This support is gratefully acknowledged.