An Application of Dynamic Programming to the Selection of Optimal Production Lengths Based on the Minimum Cutting Loss

The assortment problem with deterministic demand has been formulated so that a dynamic programming can be applied to find optimal production lengths that will minimize the sum of cutting losses. The original minimization problem can be reformulated as the maximization problem with a different objective function. This problem can be solved by the dynamic programming technique. A numerical example illustrates this approach. The ratio of computation amount of emumeration method to that of this dynamic programming is approximately n to 1.