Multi-Objective Lot-Sizing and Scheduling Dealing with Perishability Issues

The recent evidence demonstrating the importance of perishables in terms of store choice and shopping experience makes these products a very interesting topic in many different research areas. Nevertheless, the production planning research has not been paying the necessary attention to the complexities of production systems of such items. The evidence that consumers of perishable goods search for visual and other cues of freshness, such as the printed expiry dates, triggered the development of a multi-objective lot-sizing and scheduling model taking this relevant aspect into account by considering it explicitly as an objective function. A hybrid genetic algorithm based on NSGA-II was developed to allow the decision maker a true choice between different trade-offs from the Pareto front. Computational experiments were based on a case study, reported in the literature, concerning a diary company producing yogurt.