Joint lot sizing and tool management in a CNC environment

We propose a new algorithm to solve lot sizing, tool allocation and machining conditions optimization problems simultaneously to minimize total production cost in a CNC environment. Most of the existing lot sizing and tool management methods solve these problems independently using a two-level optimization approach. Thus, we not only improve the overall solution by exploiting the interactions among these decision making problems, but also prevent any infeasibility that might occur for the tool management problem due to decisions made at the lot sizing level. The computational experiments showed that in a set of randomly generated problems 22.5% of solutions found by the two-level approach were infeasible and the proposed joint approach improved the solution on the average by 6.79% for the remaining cases. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.