Design criteria for flexible production systems based on nonsimultaneous demand models

The authors present, in a unified framework, the way to deal with design problems with a nonsimultaneous description of the demand, taking into account flexibility constraints. The investments are assumed to be concentrated during the system buildup. The authors are not considering a capacity-expansion problem, in which the system capacity follows the demand behavior by a suitable distribution of investments over time. Nevertheless, a given plants final capacity is formulated in the investment sequencing problem