A hybrid approach for the capacitated lot sizing problem with setup carryover

The capacitated lot sizing problem with setup carryover deals with the issue of planning multiple products on a single machine. A setup can be carried over from one period to the next by incorporating the partial sequencing of the first and last product. This study proposes a novel hybrid approach by combining Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and a Fix-and-Optimise heuristic to solve the capacitated lot sizing problem with setup carryover. Besides this, a new initialisation scheme is suggested to reduce the solution space and to ensure a feasible solution. A comparative experimental study is carried out using some benchmark problem instances. The results indicate that the performance of the pure GAs improves when hybridised with the Fix-and-Optimise heuristic. Moreover, in terms of solution quality, promising results are obtained when compared with the recent results in the literature.