The Deterministic Dynamic Product Cycling Problem

Certain manufacturing situations involve a small number of items produced sequentially on the same facility with high changeover cost. Production schedules are characterized by long runs, and individual items are produced infrequently. At the same time, seasonal demand patterns require that the items be maintained in inventory in the right mix. This paper presents alternative formulations of this problem. It uses a Lagrangean relaxation approach to decouple the problem and provide lower bounds used in a branch and bound algorithm. Some experimental computations on small problems are reported.