Experimental comparison of the switching heuristics for aggregate production planning problem

Two improved versions of the production switching heuristic(PSH), Dominant PSH and Inventory-Ratio-Based PSH are proposed. Extensive computer experiments are performed to evaluated the proposed rules. Both linear and quadratic cost functions are adopted for the comparison study. Also. the influence of seasonality is investigated on the effectiveness of each rule. The results show that the proposed rules outperform the PSH in terms of the total cost, especially when seasonality factor is significant or the unit inventory carrying cost is high.