A Study of Different Subsequence Elimination Strategies for the Soft Drink Production Planning

Abstract

The production of soft drinks involves two main stages: syrup preparation and bottling. To obtain the lots sequence inthe bottling stage, three approaches are studied. They are based on the sub-tour elimination constraints used inmathematical models for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem. Two of the mathematical models are from theliterature and use classical constraints. The third model includes multi-commodity flow constraints to eliminatedisconnected subsequences. The computational behavior of the three models is studied using instances generatedwith data from the literature. The numerical results show that there are considerable differences among the threemodels and indicates that the multi-commodity formulation provides good results but it requires far morecomputational effort when the instances are solved by a commercial software.