Article ID: | iaor20073238 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 150 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 177 |
End Page Number: | 192 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2007 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Sforza Antonio, Marinelli Fabrizio, Nenni Maria Elena |
Keywords: | scheduling, agriculture & food |
The aim of this work is to propose a solution approach for a capacitated lot sizing and scheduling real problem with parallel machines and shared buffers, arising in a packaging company producing yoghurt. The problem has been formulated as a hybrid Continuous Set-up and Capacitated Lot Sizing Problem (CSLP-CLSP). A new effective two stage optimisation heuristic based on the decomposition of the problem into a lot sizing problem and a scheduling problem has been developed. An assignment of mixture to buffers is made in the first stage, and therefore the corresponding orders are scheduled on the production lines by performing a local search. Computational tests have been performed on the real data provided by the company. The heuristic exhibits near-optimal solutions, all obtained in a very short computational time.