A two‐phase metaheuristic approach for solving Economic Lot Scheduling Problems

In this paper, economic lot scheduling problem is investigated using time‐varying lot sizes approach. The process of finding the best production sequence consists of two‐phase implementation of metaheuristics. In the first phase, we propose a genetic algorithm that makes use of the proposed new lower bound to arrive at the good set of production frequencies of products for ELSP without/with backorders. In the second phase, the best sequence of part production is achieved by using the above set of frequencies and employing a GA and an ant‐colony algorithm. Computational experiments reveal the effectiveness of the two‐phase approach over the conventional single‐phase approach.