A modified Silver–Meal heuristic for dynamic lot sizing under incremental quantity discounts

Abstract

This note presents a variation of the well-known Silver–Meal heuristic to deal with lot sizing under a combination of a known, but time-varying, demand pattern along with an incremental quantity discount structure. The heuristic is shown to perform very well on a set of experiments presented in a recent paper in this journal. Additional experiments are performed to further explore the time horizon effects on the relative performance of the newly proposed heuristic compared to the two best performing ones from the previous paper.

Keywords:

• inventory
• quantity discounts
• purchasing
• material requirements planning
• heuristics