A time-varying lot sizes approach for the economic lot scheduling problem with returns

Abstract

We consider the economic lot scheduling problem with returns by assuming that each item is returned by a constant rate of demand. The goal is to find production frequencies, production sequences, production times, as well as idle times for several items subject to returns at a single facility. We propose a heu ristic algorithm based on a time-varying (TV) lot sizes approach. The problem is decomposed into two distinct portions: in the first, we find a combinatorial part (production frequencies and sequences) and in the second, we determine a continuous part (production and idle times) in a specific production sequence. We report computational results that show that, in many cases, the proposed TV lot sizes approach with consideration of returns yields a relatively minor error.

Keywords:

• economic lot and scheduling problem
• returns
• time-varying lot sizes approach

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the useful comments from three anonymous referees.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) [grant number 2012R1A2A2A01012355]; the ICT R&D program of MSIP/IITP [‘B0364-15-1008’, ‘Development of Open FaaS IoT Service Platform for Mass Personalization’].