The common cycle approach to the economic lot scheduling problem with insufficient capacity

A production facility is used to produce more than a single item in order to maximize its utilization. This, however, introduces a well-known phenomenon of interference which gives rise to the class of economic lot scheduling problems. In solving this problem, researchers have always assumed that the production capacity is high enough to meet the demand of all items that are produced. In this paper, we relax the capacity constraint and analyze the lot scheduling problem under insufficient capacity. We specifically study the two-product problem using the common cycle approach, and then discuss a special extension that treats any number of products.