A LAGRANGIAN RELAXATION APPROACH FOR SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING WITH ORDER／SETUP COSTS AND CAPACITY CONSTRAINTS

A heuristic approach is developed for supply chain planning modeled as multi-item multi-levelcapacitated lot sizing problems. The heuristic combines Lagrangian relaxation (LR) with local search.Different from existing LR approaches that relax capacity constraints and/or inventory balanceconstraints, our approach only relaxes the technical constraints that each 0-1 setup variable must takevalue 1 if its corresponding continuous variable is positive. The relaxed problem is approximatelysolved by using the simplex algorithm for linear programming, while Lagrange multipliers are updatedby using a surrogate subgradient method that ensures the convergence of the dual problem in case ofthe approximate resolution of the relaxed problem. At each iteration, a feasible solution of the originalproblem is constructed from the solution of the relaxed problem. The feasible solution is furtherimproved by a local search that changes the values of two setup variables at each time. By taking theadvantages of a special structure of the lot-sizing problem, the local search can be implemented byusing a modified simplex algorithm, which significantly reduces its computation time. Numericalexperiments show that our approach can find very good solutions for problems of realistic sizes in ashort computation time and is more effective than an existing commercial optimization code.