A simple heuristic for the multi item single level capacitated lotsizing problem

This paper presents a fast and flexible heuristic for the multi item capacitated lotsizing problem. The lotsizing step requires only O(NT) computations which is at least an order of magnitude faster than other well-known heuristics. The method is flexible since it allows the user to specify features such as how to sort items, which criterion to use in combining lots and how to search the demand matrix. Extensive computational results show that the new method outperforms existing heuristics both in terms of average solution quality and required computation times.