Extension of common cycle lot-size scheduling for multi-product, multi-stage arborescent flow-shop environment

This paper studies the problem of common cycle lot-size scheduling for a multiproduct, multi-stage arborescent flow-shop environment under, deterministic and stationary conditions, assuming a fixed sequence maintaining across all processing stages. The considered costs for modelling include set-up costs, carrying costs of finished inventory and carrying costs of in-process inventories. The policy of production scheduling is the use of an identical and common cycle for all stages, and the lot size of every product is computed based on its forecasted demand over the production cycle time. The aim of this paper is to present the solution methods for the problem and to determine simultaneous production cycle time and production schedule with minimum cost For this purpose, an optimal method and a heuristic procedure are developed and applied for various examples. Computational results demonstrate that the solutions gained through the heuristic procedure are very close to the optimal solutions. In fact, it is proved that the heuristic procedure is highly efficient and can be applied for the problems of great size.