Determination of replenishment dates for restricted-storage, static demand, cyclic replenishment schedule

This study focuses on scheduling replenishment lots of multiple products in a warehouse with restricted storage space where the replenishment cycle time of each product is given and is an integer multiple of some basic period. Assuming that the warehouse replenishes at the beginning of some basic period, this study proposes a new heuristic that utilizes two simple procedures to generate a replenishment schedule that minimizes the maximum warehouse-space requirement. By including a re-optimization mechanism and a Boltzmann function, the proposed heuristic obtains solutions very close to the global optimum within a reasonable run time. Using randomly generated instances, this study shows that the proposed heuristic significantly outperforms a previously published heuristic.