A basic period approach to the economic lot scheduling problem with shelf life consideration

Almost all the research on the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) considering limited shelf life of products has assumed a common cycle approach and an unrealistic assumption of possibility of deliberately reducing the production rate. In many cases, as in food processing industry where limited shelf life for products is common, changing the production rates is not allowed at all because it may result in products with poor quality. In this paper, we allow products to be produced more than once in a cycle and do not allow reducing production rates. We present a modification to the Haessler's basic period procedure to account for the shelf life. Proposed ‘branch-and-bound like’ procedure exploits these extra constraints to efficiently achieve a feasible solution. Numerical examples are presented to show that our approach outperforms common cycle approach with shelf life considerations.