the economic lot scheduling problem in flow lines with sequence-dependent setups

the problem of lot sizing, sequencing and scheduling multiple products in flow line production systems has been studied by several authors. almost all of the researches in this area assumed that setup times and costs are sequence –independent even though sequence dependent setups are common in practice. in this paper we present a new mixed integer non linear program (minlp) and a heuristic method to solve the problem in sequence dependent case. furthermore, a genetic algorithm has been developed which applies this constructive heuristic to generate initial population. these two proposed solution methods are compared on randomly generated problems. computational results show a clear superiority of our proposed ga for majority of the test problems.