Lot sizing in general assemby systems with setup costs, setup times, and multiple constrained resources

A paper introduces a heuristic method for finding good, feasible solutions for multiproduct lot sizing problems with general assembly structures, multiple constrained resources, and nonzero setup costs and setup times. The performance of this heuristic is evaluated by comparing its solutions to optimal solutions of small randomly generated problems and to time-truncated Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL) solutions of medium-sized randomly generated problems. In the 1st case, the heuristic locates solutions averaging 4% worse than optimal in less than 1% of time required by OSL. The heuristic solutions to medium-sized problems are approximately 26% better than solutions OSL finds after 10,000 CPU seconds, and the heuristic finds these solutions in approximately 10% of OSL time.