THE ECONOMICS OF DECOMPOSITION: RESOURCE ALLOCATION VS TRANSFER PRICING

Two distinctively different decomposition algorithms have been developed. Both are analagous to decentralized decision making in the firm. One essentially deals with the allocation of corporate resources by the use of transfer prices charged to the divisions, while the other deals with the direct allocation of fixed quantities of the corporate resources to each division. The analogy of a price coordinated, or transfer pricing, technique to decentralization was developed by Baumol and Fabian [1] and later by Kim [4]. The second approach to decomposition was developed by Kornai and Liptak [5] [6] in an attempt to formulate the planning problem in a Socialist economy. It is the purpose of this paper to develop the analogy of the resource allocation decomposition to decentralized decision making.     

A goal programming approach to production planning for flexible manufacturing systems

The increased use of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) reduces production time variability as the fixed processing time of automated systems replaces the variable processing time of human resources in production systems. This reduction in the variability permits the application of deterministic, constrained optimization models that recognize the conflicting multi-objective nature of resource utilization in an FMS environment. One such multi-objective optimization model is linear goal programming. Unlike most linear programming models, linear goal programming is designed to handle conflicting multi-objective problems. A goal programming model is developed a and presented in this paper as an aid in FMS planning. An application is also presented to illustrate the informational benefits of using the proposed model.