A fix-and-optimize heuristic for the capacitated multi-item stochastic lot-sizing problem

This study addresses the stochastic multi-item capacitated lot-sizing problem. Here, it is assumed that all items are produced on a single production resource and unmet demands are backlogged. The literature shows that the deterministic version of this problem is NP-Hard. We consider the case where period demands are time-varying random variables. The objective is to determine the minimum expected cost production plan so as to meet stochastic period demands over the planning horizon. We extend the mixed integer programming formulation introduced in the literature to capture the problem under consideration. Further, we propose a fix-and-optimize heuristic building on an item-period oriented decomposition scheme. We then conduct a numerical study to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic as compared to the heuristic introduced by Tempelmeier and Hilger [16]. The results clearly show that the proposed fix-and-optimize heuristic arises as both cost-efficient and time-efficient solution approach as compared to the benchmark heuristic.