A general approach to multi-item capacitated dynamic lot-sizing problems

In this paper, we solve the multi-item capacitated dynamic lot-sizingproblems, where each item faces a series of dynamic demand and in each period,multiple items share limited production resources. The objective is to find theoptimal production plan so as to minimize the total cost, including productioncost, inventory holding cost, and fixed setup cost. We consider bothsingle-level and multi-level cases; in the multi-level case, some items areconsumed in order to produce some other items and therefore, items faceinternally generated demands in addition to external demands. We propose asimple two-stage approach, which is applicable to both classes of problems.Extensive experiments show that the approach gives very good performancecompared with the existing methods. We then provide an analysis on how thesuperior performance is achieved. Besides its performance, one appealing featureof our method is its simplicity and general applicability. © 2009 IEEE.