An Improved Heuristic for Solving the Eco- Nomic Lot Scheduling Problem in Flow Shops under Power-of-two Policy

This paper proposes a new heuristic for solving the economic lot scheduling problem in flow shops under the Power-of-Two policy. A review of relevant literature shows that the heuristic in Ouenniche and Boctor [15] not only solves this problem with the best objective function value among the existing solution approaches, but also generates a feasible production schedule. However there are several problems when implementing Ouenniche and Boctor’s heuristic. Therefore, we are motivated to propose an improved heuristic in this study. To evaluate the performance of the improved heuristic, a total of 1,800 instances were randomly generated and then solved by both solution approaches in our experiments. The numerical results conclude that the improved heuristic significantly outperforms Ouenniche and Boctor’s heuristic.