NEW HEURISTICS FOR SOLVING THE ECONOMIC LOT SCHEDULING PROBLEM WITH REWORKS

Abstract

In this study, we are interested in the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) that considers manufacturing of the serviceable products and remanufacturing of the rework products. In this paper, we formulate a mathematical model for the ELSP with reworks using the common cycle approach in which only one manufacturing lot and only one rework lot for each product exist during a common cycle. In order to solve this problem, we propose two heuristics that not only search for the optimal cycle time and an optimal production sequence, but also utilize a simple scheduling heuristic to schedule the starting time of all the manufacturing and rework lots so as to minimize the average total costs. The first heuristic is a simple heuristic that employs a 2-opt search to obtain a close-to-optimal production sequence. The second heuristic, which is a refined version of the simple heuristic, employs a bisection search to look for an optimal cycle time. In our numerical experiments, we compare the effectiveness of both heuristics using randomly generated instances.