Determining production schedules under base-stock policies in single facility multi-item production systems

In this paper we address periodic base-stock policies for stochastic economic lot scheduling problems. These represent manufacturing settings in which multiple items compete for the availability of a common capacity source, in the presence of setup times and/or costs, incurred when switching between items, and in the presence of uncertainty regarding demand patterns, production, and setup times. Under periodic base-stock policies, items are produced according to a given periodic item-sequence. This paper derives effective heuristics for the design of a periodic item-sequence minimizing system-wide costs. This sequence is constructed based on desirable production frequencies for the items, obtained as the solution of lower bound mathematical programs. An extensive numerical study gauges the quality of the proposed heuristics.