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The steel mill slab design problem from the CSPLIB is a combinatorial optimization problem motivated by an application of the steel industry. It has been widely studied in the constraint programming community. Several methods were proposed to solve this problem. A steel mill slab library was created which contains 380 instances. A closely related binpacking problem called the multiple knapsack problem with color constraints, originated from the same industrial problem, was discussed in the integer programming community. In particular, a simple integer program for this problem has been given by Forrest et al. (INFORMS J Comput 18:129–134, 2006). The aim of this paper is to bring these different studies together. Moreover, we adapt the model of Forrest et al. (INFORMS J Comput 18:129–134, 2006) for the steel mill slab design problem. Using this model and a state-of-the-art integer program solver all instances of the steel mill slab library can be solved efficiently to optimality. We improved, thereby, the solution values of 76 instances compared to previous results (Schaus et al., Constraints 16:125–147, 2010). Finally, we consider a recently introduced variant of the steel mill slab design problem, where within all solutions which minimize the leftover one is interested in a solution which requires a minimum number of slabs. For that variant we introduce two approaches and solve all instances of the steel mill slab library with this slightly changed objective function to optimality.
In this paper, we study the hop constrained chain polytope, that is, the convex hull of the incidence vectors of (s,t)-chains using at most k arcs of a given digraph, and its dominant. We use extended formulations (implied by the inherent structure of the Moore-Bellman-Ford algorithm) to derive facet defining inequalities for these polyhedra via projection. Our findings result into characterizations of all facet defining {0,+1,-1}-inequalities for the hop constrained chain polytope and all facet defining {0,1}-inequalities
for its dominant. Although the derived inequalities are already known, such classifications were not previously given to the best of our knowledge. Moreover, we use this approach to generalize so called jump inequalities, which have been introduced in a paper of Dahl and Gouveia in 2004.