FLEXIBILITY APPLICATIONS IN LOT SIZING PROBLEMS

• Grant number: 23/05705-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2023
• End date: August 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Production Engineering - Operational Research
• Principal Investigator: Diego Jacinto Fiorotto
• Grantee: Nicolas Keichi Matsuse Shirai
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Aplicadas (FCA). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Limeira , SP, Brazil

Abstract

With the natural evolution of the industrial decisions-making process due, among others factors, the strong competition imposed by the globalized market, different strategies have been used to improve the decisions, making them more complex. Among these strategies, recently it has appeared studies which consider that some data, although deterministic, have certain flexibility, making the problem similar to what happens in practice. This project is in line with this trend of the evolution of the decision process. Despite the relevance, there are few works that make a detailed study about adding flexibility in lot sizing problems. The lot sizing problem consists of determining the quantity of products to be produced in each period of a finite time horizon, in order to meet the demand and optimize an objective function, for example, to minimize costs. In the standard lot sizing problem on parallel machines, each item can be produced on any of the machines and incurs a setup cost and time before production. In this case we have complete machine flexibility. However, in practice, it can be very costly to install machines that have complete flexibility, especially if the products are very different. Therefore, it might be interesting to only implement a limited amount of flexibility (each machine can produce only certain types of items). In this research project it is intended to carry out a study e analysis of new flexibility configurations applied to the problem.