1. Scope of Problem Coverage and Introduction

This chapter begins with an introduction to the book’s scope and preliminary concepts applied throughout the book. We then present a set of basic, foundational, and classical models from the operations planning literature that serve as the underpinning of the work presented throughout the book. These models include the economic order quantity (EOQ), the newsvendor problem, the economic lot-sizing problem (ELSP), the knapsack problem (KP), the generalized assignment problem (GAP), and the facility location problem (FLP). The main results presented later in this book generalize these classical models to account for a planner’s ability to influence demands, which have traditionally served as fixed parameters in these foundational models.