Capacitated dynamic lotsizing heuristics for serial systems

This paper deals with multi-item capacitated lotsizing in a serial production environment under dynamic demand conditions. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the performance of simple level-by-level heuristics. A problem classification is proposed to distinguish between easy problems and harder ones for which no simple heuristics can be developed. It is shown how simple algorithms can be constructed for the easier problems using a level-by-level approach. These heuristics are the first of their kind for this problem. They are compared with the optimal solution for a set of test problems. The results show that for some problem classes strategies which are frequently used in practice may result in rather poor schedules.