For help in formulating a model of your own integer or mixed integer problem, you may want to consult H.P. Williams's textbook about practical model building (referenced in Further Reading).
Also you may want to develop a better understanding of the branch & cut algorithm. For that purpose, Williams's book offers a good introduction, and Nemhauser and Wolsey's book (also referenced in Further Reading) goes into greater depth about branch & cut as well as other techniques implemented in the ILOG CPLEX MIP Optimizer.
The section Performance Features of the Mixed Integer Optimizer in this chapter has already discussed several specific features that are important for performance tuning of difficult models. Here, we turn attention to specific performance symptoms and the remedies that can be tried.