Solving a Rich Position-Based Model for Dairy Products

By considering the lot-sizing problem and the detailed sequencing and scheduling problem simultaneously in a very realistic model formulation we aim to improve the overall performance of the entire production process for a dairy producing company. For this purpose we extended the Position-Based Model introduced by Lütke et al. (Int. J. Prod. Res. 43, 5071–5100, 2005 [5]). Based on a set of real-world production data, we used our model to determine exact solutions to very small problem settings. As even for small instances the time required for obtaining exact solutions is too long in general, we developed a fix&optimize inspired construction heuristic to obtain a feasible solution for several products. The results of our approach show that the solutions obtained are competitive compared to the optimal solution with less time consumption.