Rotation cycle schedulings for multi-item production systems

Consider the production planning and scheduling on a single machine with finite constant production rate over a planning horizon N. For single-item production problem, we have characterised the structure of the optimal solution when N approaches to infinity. This result suggests a near optimal solution when the planning horizon N is large. For multi-item production problem, we restrict our analysis on the Rotation Cycle policies. Under the assumptions of the policy, we convert the problem into a generalised travelling salesman problem and hence a branch and bound algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. For a given error bound of the solution, the algorithm can be further simplified to determine a near-optimal rotation cycle.