The economic lot scheduling problem under power-of-two policy

We present further analysis on the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) without capacity constraints under power-of-two (PoT) policy. We explore its optimality structure and discover that the optimal objective value is piece-wise convex. By making use of the junction points of this function, we derive an effective (polynomial-time) search algorithm to secure a global optimal solution. The conclusions of this research lay the foundation for deriving an efficient heuristic, and also creates a benchmark for evaluating the quality of the heuristics for the conventional ELSP under PoT policy.