The deterministic lotsizing problems considered in this book deal with determining minimal cost production schedules and inventory replenishment strategies, such that (known) market demand is fulfilled satisfactorily, while capacity restrictions on production resources are not violated. The author gives researchers and interested practitioners a review and comparison of mathematical model formulations and solution procedures for the deterministic lotsizing problem. The relevance of lotsizing procedures within modern production planning systems, such as MRP, JIT and OPT, is discussed. A novel class of model formulations is introduced in which lotsizing and production sequencing aspects are considered simultaneously. Several variants of practical relevance are analysed, including the case of parallel machine production lines, sequence dependent setup costs, and nontrivial machine setup times. A literature review is given for multilevel lotsizing problems, and model formulations and solution procedures are discussed. New heuristic procedures are presented that rely on mathematical programming techniques and statistical search techniques such as simulated annealing and table search.
The results of a computational com- parison between the various solution procedures on a large set of problems are discussed.