General lot-sizing and scheduling for perishable food products

Abstract

General lot-sizing and scheduling is a well-studied problem in the literature, but for perishable or time-sensitive products is less investigated. Also, most of studies on perishable product supply chains focus on strategic and tactical decision levels rather than operational decision level and integrated operational and tactical decision levels. We focus on a general lot-sizing and scheduling problem faced by perishable food products. The lifespan and shelf life are two important key features of perishable products that are considered in the problem. This problem can be described as a multi-product, multi-parallel line, multi-period general lot-sizing and scheduling problem with sequence dependent change over time. The objective function is sum of production costs, inventory holding costs, waste costs, and lifespan related cost function. We apply two mixed-integer programming based heuristics to solve generated instances. The heuristics are compared in terms of solution quality and computational time. Also, the sensitivity analysis is presented to analyze the effects of parameters’ changes.