The authors are concerned with the problem of scheduling m items, facing constant demand rates, on a single facility to minimize the long-run average holding, backorder, and setup costs. The inventory holding and backlogging costs are charged at a linear time weighted rate. The authors develop a lower bound on the cost of all feasible schedules and extend recent developments in the economic lot scheduling problem, via time-varying lot sizes, to find optimal or near-optimal cyclic schedules. The resulting schedules are used elsewhere as target schedules when demands are random.
