Fix-and-Optimize and Variable Neighborhood Search Approaches for Stochastic Multi-Item Capacitated Lot-Sizing Problems

We discuss stochastic multi-item capacitated lot-sizing problems with and without setup carryovers (also known as link lot size), S-MICLSP and S-MICLSP-L. The two models are motivated from a real-world steel enterprise. To overcome the nonlinearity of the models, a piecewise linear approximation method is proposed. We develop a new fix-and-optimize (FO) approach to solve the approximated models. Compared with the existing FO approach(es), our FO is based on the concept of “ -degree-connection†for decomposing the problems. Furthermore, we also propose an integrative approach combining our FO and variable neighborhood search (FO-VNS), which can improve the solution quality of our FO approach by diversifying the search space. Numerical experiments are performed on the instances following the nature of realistic steel products. Our approximation method is shown to be efficient. The results also show that the proposed FO and FO-VNS approaches significantly outperform the recent FO approaches, and the FO-VNS approaches can be more outstanding on the solution quality with moderate computational effort.