The selection of clients for promotion campaigns by means of mathematical programming

This paper presents an optimization model for the selection of sets of clients that will receive an offer for one or more products during a promotion campaign. The complexity of the problem makes it very difficult to produce optimal solutions using standard optimization methods. We propose an alternative set covering formulation and develop a branch-and-price algorithm to solve it. We also describe seven heuristics to approximate an optimal solution. We perform extensive computational experiments for the two formulations as well as for the seven heuristics.