Effectiveness Comparison of Solution Approaches for Solving the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem

Abstract

The most popular solution approaches for solving the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) include the common cycle (CC) approach, the extended basic period (EBP) approach and the time-varying lot sizing (TVLS) approach where both the CC and EBP approaches are the basic period-based approaches. Some studies claimed that the TVLS approach is able to obtain better solutions than the basic period-based approaches though without the support of extensive numerical experiments. Therefore, we are motivated to compare the performance of the CC, EBP and the TVLS approaches in this study. Interestingly, our random experiments show no one serves as a dominant solution approach among the three approaches, but the settings of setup cost and setup time could affect their performance significantly. Our results may be valuable for the decision makers before they choose a solution approach for solving the ELSP.

Keywords

• Lot
• scheduling
• inventory
• production