We also compare the two rationing policies with the best non-rationing policy. In general the performance of the simple policy is almost as good as that of the optimal policy. When dealing with different demand classes the usual approach is to control the inventory by critical levels at which stock is reserved for demand of higher priority. We assume a periodic model where there is a fixed amount of capacity available in each period. There are holding costs for jobs in process and penalty costs for jobs finished after their due date.
Jobs have different profitability.
The objective is to maximize the long-run average profit minus holding and penalty costs. We present a near-optimal rationing policy where jobs are accepted or rejected based on the properties of the job and the current state of the system. The computation of the near-optimal policy is intractable for realistically sized problems. We therefore suggest two simple policies which are easy to find and easy to implement in practice. The simple policies are benchmarked against the near-optimal policy on low dimensional problems in a numerical study and are shown to have a fine performance.