ABSTRACTTo provide effective managerial support for decisions related to production planning and scheduling processes, it is useful to partition the set of decisions into a hierarchical framework. In the resulting system, higher level decisions impose constraints on lower level actions, and lower level decisions provide the necessary feed‐back to reevaluate higher level actions. The purpose of this paper is to suggest optimum procedures to deal with the resulting subproblems and to analyze the interaction mechanisms among the different hierarchical levels. Computational results are give