Economic production quantity (EPQ) model in ‘pull’ managed single-machine multi-item production systems

For decades researchers have been facing the issue of adapting the economic production quantity (EPQ) to the case of multi-item production contexts characterised by a single (shared) resource with finite capacity. The economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP), which is still of interest to researchers, has addressed this issue. A recent attempt by Rossi et al. (Omega 71:106–113, 2017) addressed the problem while avoiding scheduling. Notwithstanding their relevance, these approaches present limitations in adapting the EPQ model to multi-product ‘pull’ production systems. The present work attempts to overcome these limitations through the development of a methodology based on the equation proposed by Mallya ( 1992 ) and restricting items production frequencies to define feasible solutions while avoiding scheduling. The feasibility and performance of the proposed model are evaluated through its application to well-known benchmarking instances (Bomberger’s, Eilon’s and Mallya’s problems) and a large set of test problems.