Uncapacitated lot sizing with backlogging: the convex hull

An explicit description of the convex hull of solutions to the uncapacitated lot-sizing problem with backlogging, in its natural space of production, setup, inventory and backlogging variables, has been an open question for many years. In this paper, we identify valid inequalities that subsume all previously known valid inequalities for this problem. We show that these inequalities are enough to describe the convex hull of solutions. We give polynomial separation algorithms for some special cases. Finally, we report a summary of computational experiments with our inequalities that illustrates their effectiveness.