Modeling of period overlapping setup times

Setup operations play an important role in many production environments. In this paper, the exact modeling of setup times is motivated and two mixed integer programming model formulations are proposed. These model formulations allow the representation of ‘‘long’’ setup times with respect to the length of a planning period, which are widespread in process industries. Computational results underscore the importance of careful modeling of setup times and demonstrate the capabilities of the two proposed model formulations. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.