An analysis of multi-level lot-sizing problems with a bottleneck under a rolling schedule environment

Much research into multi-level lot-sizing problems has concentrated on fixed horizon problems ignoring more realistic conditions such as appending new demand(s) in the planning periods. The aim of this paper is to illustrate that a heuristic, which was developed earlier by the authors, is applicable to the multi-level lot-sizing problem with a bottleneck under a rolling schedule environment. The results illustrate that the Silver-Meal (SM) approach performed better than the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) approach in terms of cost measures, when incorporated within the heuristic procedure. The results also show that, although the total cost of the problem is increased in a rolling schedule environment, the heuristic continues to perform favourably in producing low cost solutions.