Simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling on parallel machines

This paper addresses the simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling of several products on non-identical parallel production lines (heterogeneous machines). The limited capacity of the production lines may be further reduced by sequence dependent setup times. Deterministic, dynamic demand of standard products has to be met without back-logging with the objective of minimizing sequence dependent setup, holding and production costs. The problem is heuristically solved by combining the local search metastrategies threshold accepting (TA) and simulated annealing (SA), respectively, with dual reoptimization. Such a solution approach has already proved to be successful for the single machine case. The solution quality and computational performance of the new heuristics are tested by means of real-world problems gathered from industry. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.