A Search Algorithm for Solving the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem with Returns under the Basic Period Approach

In this study, we are interested in the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) that considers manufacturing of the serviceable products and remanufacturing of the returned products. In this paper, we formulate a mathematical model for the ELSP with returns using the basic period approach. In order to solve this problem, we propose a search algorithm to find the cyclic multiplier k_i of each product that can be cyclically produced for every k_i basic periods. This research also uses two heuristics to search for the optimal production sequence of all lots and the optimal time length of the basic period so as to minimize the average total cost. This research uses a numerical example to show the effectiveness of our approach.