Production lot sizing for deterministic rolling schedules

In this article, the authors study production planning for a rolling horizon in which demands are known with certainty for a given number of periods in the future (the forecast window M). The rolling horizon approach implements only the earliest production decision before the model is rerun. The next production plan will again be based on M periods of future demand information, and its first lot-sizing decision will be implemented. Six separate lot-sizing methods were evaluated for use in a rolling schedule. These include the Wagner-Whitin algorithm, the Silver-Meal heuristic, Maximum Part-Period Gain of Karni, Heuristics 1 and 2 of Bookbinder and Tan, and Modification 1 to the Silver-Meal heuristic by Silver and Miltenburg.