Determining a common production cycle time for an economic lot scheduling problem with deteriorating items

This paper considers the economic lot scheduling problem for a production–inventory system where items produced are subject to continuous deterioration. The problem is to schedule multiple products to be manufactured on a single machine repetitively over an infinite planning horizon. Each product is assumed to have a significant rate of deterioration. Only one product can be manufactured at a time. The demand rate for each product is constant, but an exponential distribution is used to represent the distribution of the time to deterioration. A common cycle time policy is assumed in the production process. A near optimal production cycle time is derived under conditions of continuous review, deterministic demand, and no shortage.