An Evolutionary Computation Approach to the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem

The economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) addresses the problem of scheduling several items each with its own static, deterministic demand at a single facility, where only one item can be produced at any time. This classical production planning problem has been studied extensively over the last three decades and various heuristic solution methods have been proposed, most of them based on the concept of a basic period. A common drawback of the majority of the existing heuristics is the lack of explicit, algorithmic mechanisms to develop feasible schedules, and the consequent use of ad hoc procedures. We propose an efficient evolutionary computation technique for this problem. Our heuristic searches the problem domain with a population of solutions and converges very quickly to low cost, feasible schedules. We present our results in comparison to the best known heuristics.