The Use of an Economic Lot Range in Scheduling Production

Abstract

Conventional production scheduling makes use of a minimum cost production quantity. Since cost is relatively insensitive to the production quantity within some range of the minimum cost production quantity, substantial freedom of action can be given the production scheduler provided he stays within some defined range. This paper presents two approaches to defining such a range. One approach involves little computation but can be applied only to the simplest type of cost function. The other approach can be applied to any cost function, but is more difficult to compute. With either approach, precomputed tables can simplify the scheduling process on a near-optimum basis.