International Business Machines Corporation

John Joseph Forrest

Robert J Milne

Brian Trevor Denton

Nimrod Megiddo

Brett Olsson

Mark A Johnson

Fred Gehrung Gustavson

Brenda Lynn Dietrich

Ramesh Chandra Agarwal

John Anthony Tomlin

The invention comprises a method for achieving consideration of preemptive priorities within a supply chain optimization model. More specifically, the invention provides a method of allocating resources to a hierarchy of demand priorities in a linear programming production planning system. In particular, the invention aggregates the demand priorities into different priority groups and allocates the resources to the highest priority group of demand priorities using a first linear programming model. Next, the invention allocates remaining resources to the next highest priority group of demand priorities using a second linear programming model. The second linear programming model uses results from the first linear programming model. The invention continues this process by iteratively repeating the process of allocating remaining resources to the remaining groups of demand priorities, in order of priority. The system and method were employed to integrate the consideration of preemptive prioritization of customer demands with an advanced planning system for optimizing established planning objectives (e.g. customer service, short lead times, low inventory, and prioritized allocation of supply and capacity) to compute a feasible production plan for the division.

Method for considering hierarchical preemptive demand priorities in a supply chain optimization model

Allocating limited manufacturing resources to achieve a feasible production plan that is consistent with customer demand is a difficult and common problem faced in many manufacturing industries. For large-scale multi-stage manufacturing systems, existing methods are typically based either on allocating limited resources sequentially, according to a priority ranked list of production starts, or linear programming based models. The output of such planning models is a production plan which specifies the quantity of each part to produce at each plant, using resources available to the enterprise. Typically there are lot-sizing rule defining the permissible production start quantities. The invention disclosed herein is a method for applying these rules to the lot-sizing of production starts within a linear program. It employs advanced heuristics that consider both established operational objectives (e.g. customer service, short lead times, low inventory, and prioritized allocation of supply and capacity) and lot-size rules to efficiently compute a feasible production plan for the division.

Method for sizing production lot starts within a linear system programming environment

A method for determining the set of winning bids in a combinatorial auction. Two variants of the method are disclosed. The first method is appropriate when the number of players and the number of combinations of items that are bid on by an individual player are relatively small. The second method is applicable when either of these values becomes large.

Method for determining the set of winning bids in a combinatorial auction

A computer-based method and system comprising three data structures: partially ordered data structure (or simply ordered data structure), contiguous list v, and vector p, is used for solving a large sparse triangular system of linear equations which utilizes only the non-zero components of a matrix to solve large sparse triangular linear equations and generates explicitly only the non-zero entries of the solution. A list of the row indices of the known non-zero values of x which require further processing is stored in the ordered data structure. Actual non-zero values of x are stored in the contiguous list v and the corresponding pointers to the location of these values are stored in the vector p. The computer-based method manipulates these three matrices to find a solution to an upper or lower sparse triangular system of linear equations. In addition, in the instance a matrix becomes dense (or increases in density) by the presence of many active rows, a partitioning method is described via which the dense matrix problem is solved.

Method for solving a large sparse triangular system of linear equations

In a data processing unit, an instruction is loaded. Such an instruction includes an operation code field for storing an operation code and at least one operand field, where the operand field includes an indirect addressing mode indicator for indicating enablement of an indirect addressing mode. If an indirect addressing mode is enabled, a general purpose register address is selected from an address field in an indirect register. Finally, the data processing unit addresses a selected one of the plurality of general purpose registers utilizing the general purpose register address during the execution of the operation code by the data processing unit.

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Peekskill, NY, United States of America

John Joseph Forrest