The uncapacitatied dynamic single-level lot-sizing problem under a time-varying environment and an exact solution approach

Abstract

The dynamic lot-sizing problem under a time-varying environment considers new features of the production system where factors such as production setup cost, unit inventory-holding cost, and unit price of manufacturing resources may vary in different periods over the whole planning horizon. Traditional lot-sizing theorems and algorithms are no longer fit for these situations as they had assumed constant environments. In our study, we investigated the dynamic lot-sizing problem with deteriorating production setup cost, a typical time-varying environment where the production setup is assumed to consume more preparing time and manufacturing resources as the production interval lasts longer. We proposed new lot-sizing models based on the traditional lot-sizing model considering the changing setup cost as a new constraint, called uncapacitatied dynamic single-level lot-sizing under a time-varying environment (UDSLLS-TVE for short). The UDSLLS-TVE problem has a more realistic significance and higher research value as it is closer to reality and has higher computational complexity as well. We proposed two mathematical programming models to describe UDSLLS_TVE with or without nonlinear components, respectively. Properties of the UDSLLS-TVE models were extensively analyzed and an exact algorithm based on forward dynamic programming (FDP) was proposed to solve this problem with a complexity of O (n2). Comparative experiments with the commercial MIP solver CPLEX on synthesized problem instances showed that the FDP algorithm is a global optimization algorithm and has a high computational efficiency.