Inventory Matching Problems in the Steel Industry

This report is an e ort to consolidate two di erent avors of a surplus inventory matching problem encountered in the steel industry: Surplus Un nished Inventory Matching, and Surplus Finished Inventory Matching. This report is compiled from two other reports that describe the heuristic solution approaches developed for a real world application of these problems [1, 2]. The focus here is to motivate these problems from an operations planning point of view. The initial sections of this report provide an overview of the production planning process in the steel industry and situate the surplus inventory problem within this context. Subsequently the report is split into distinct parts: Part I: Surplus Un nished Inventory Matching Part II: Surplus Finished Inventory Matching The problem formulations and solution approaches in these sections are based on the following technical reports respectively. 1. Kalagnanam,J.R., M. Dawande, M. Trumbo, H.S. Lee (1998) \The Surplus Inventory Matching Problem", IBM Research Report 21071 (94285), IBM Research Division, Yorktown Hts, NY. 2. Salman, F.S., J.R. Kalagnanam, S. Murthy (1997) \Cooperative Strategies for Solving the Bicriteria Sparse Multiple Knapsack Problem", IBM Research Report 21059 (94164), IBM Research Division, Yorktown Hts, NY.