The scheduling of economic lot sizes on volume flexible production systems

Previous efforts on solving the classical economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) assume pre-determined and inflexible production rates. Production rates in many cases, such as orders filled by a machine, can be changed. Moreover, unit production cost of an item depends on its production rate. In this paper, we extend the ELSP model to cases where production rates are decision variables. Unit production cost for each item becomes a function of its production rate. We propose an algorithm to find a solution to the modified economic lot scheduling problem for special unit production cost functions and illustrate the results with numerical examples.