Models and Heuristics for Product Line Selection

Two versions of the problem are formulated and various heuristic approaches are presented and evaluated, finding the optimum solution is computationally prohibitive, even for modest size problems.

Abstract

Recently, a number of articles have appeared in the marketing literature dealing with (single) product design optimization. The present paper represents a start toward extending this research to product line decisions. We first formulate two versions of the problem and describe their various characteristics. Since finding the optimum solution is computationally prohibitive, even for modest size problems, various heuristic approaches are presented and evaluated. Applications involving synthetic and real data are discussed. The paper concludes with comments on related problems and future application areas.