A semi-infinite programming model for earliness/tardiness production planning with simulated annealing

To describe the earliness/tardiness production planning problems in the JIT environment, a nonlinear semi-infinite programming model was proposed in [1]. Due to a nonconvex objective function and infinitely many constraints, the model is difficult to solve by traditional methods. In this paper, simulated annealing method combined with a heuristic and the steepest descent method is developed. Numerical results shows that the present approach is very efficient. In theory, the developed method is an attempt to solve a continuous domain problem by simulated annealing.