An exact column-generation approach for the lot-type design problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exact column-generation method with specialized algorithms to efficiently solve the lot-type design problem in fashion distribution, optimizing supply to branches based on demand.

Contribution

It presents a novel tailored column-generation approach with fast algorithms for subproblems, improving efficiency on real-world and random instances.

Findings

Method is highly efficient on real-world instances.

Approach effectively approximates branch and size demand.

Significantly reduces computational time compared to previous methods.

Abstract

We consider a fashion discounter distributing its many branches with integral multiples from a set of available lot-types. For the problem of approximating the branch and size dependent demand using those lots we propose a tailored exact column generation approach assisted by fast algorithms for intrinsic subproblems, which turns out to be very efficient on our real-world instances as well as on random instances.