This book deals with problems of Operational Production Planning and Lot-Sizing. Problems of
this type, and the data collection and analysis involved, are also called Production Analytics, a subset of the more general Business Analytics. These are commonly divided into Descriptive Analytics (data collection and analysis, visualization, etc.), Predictive Analytics (identification of relationships between variables, forecasting, etc.) and Prescriptive Analytics (decision preparation, optimization, etc.). The book is about optimization models and algorithms for production planning, i. e., problems from the field of Prescriptive Analytics.