Article ID: | iaor20031405 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 141 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 133 |
End Page Number: | 146 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2002 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Wagner Bret J., Davis Darwin J. |
Keywords: | production, heuristics, programming: travelling salesman |
Almost all of the research on the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) has assumed that setup times are sequence-independent even though sequence-dependent problems are common in practice. Furthermore, most of the solution approaches that have been developed solve for a single optimal schedule when in practice it is more important to provide managers with a range of schedules of different length and complexity. In this paper, we develop a heuristic procedure to solve the ELSP problem with sequence-dependent setups. The heuristic provides a range of solutions from which a manager can choose, which should prove useful in an actual stochastic production environment. We show that our heuristic can outperform Dobson's heuristic when the utilization is high and the sequence-dependent setup times and costs are significant.