Economic lot and supply scheduling problem: a time-varying lot sizes approach

We study the economic lot and supply scheduling problem (ELSSP) that arises in the distribution and manufacturing industries. The ELSSP involves the simultaneous scheduling of end-item production and inbound transportation of input materials over an infinite time horizon to minimise the average costs of inventory, production set-up and transportation. We present a new methodology based on a time-varying lot sizes approach for the ELSSP. We also provide computational experiments showing that the developed algorithm outperforms the existing heuristic for improved integrated scheduling.