Economic lot scheduling problems incorporating a cost of using the production facility

Abstract

This paper considers scheduling the production of several different items on a single machine with constrained capacity, commonly known as the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP). Most traditional approaches for the ELSP consider the sum of the set-up cost and inventory holding cost and provide cyclic schedules that minimise this sum. In practice, there are not only costs for set-ups and inventory holding, but also costs for operating the production facility due to, for example, electricity, service, maintenance, tools, operators, etc, which depend on the number of hours the facility is operating per working day. In this paper, we modify the traditional cost function to include not only set-up and inventory holding cost but also a time variable cost for operating the production facility. The paper shows it is possible to adapt a previous heuristic procedure to this complemented cost. The model can help to determine cyclic schedules and the number of production hours per working day.

Keywords:

• ELSP
• multi products
• single machine
• capacity constrained
• production facility cost

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to valuable comments from the anonymous reviewers. This study has partly been supported by Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Research Foundations, project ‘J01-23’.