A Differential Evolution Algorithm for the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem

Abstract

In this study we provide a Differential Evolution (DE) based heuristic to solve the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP) under basic period approach. The problem is to find the best cyclic production schedule of n items to be produced on a single machine such that the production cycle of each item is an integer multiple of the basic period. The demand and the production rates are deterministic and known in advance. Our computational results suggest that our algorithm is competitive with the existing genetic algorithm, and therefore it is promising for the solution of a generalized version of the problem which is called extended basic period approach in the future.