The economic lot scheduling problem with deteriorating items and shortage: an imperialist competitive algorithm

This paper addresses an economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) for manufacturing environments regarding slack costs and deteriorating items using the extended basic period approach under Power-of-Two (PoT) policy. The purpose of this research is to determine an optimal batch size for a product and minimizing total related costs to such a problem. The cost function consists of three components, namely, setup cost, holding cost includes deteriorating factor, and slack cost. The ELSP is concerned with the scheduling decision of n items and lot sizing. Avoiding schedule interference is the main problem in ELSP. The used PoT policy ensures that the replenishment cycle of each item to be integer and this task reduces potential schedule interferences. Since the ELSP is shown as an NP-hard problem, an imperialist competitive algorithm is employed to provide good solutions within reasonable computational times. Computational results show that the proposed approach can efficiently solve such complicated problems.