A decision support system for materials requirements planning lot-sizing

This paper describes a decision support system (DSS) developed to assist the practising manager making routine decisions with regard to the lot-sizing problem. The DSS is spreadsheet look-alike and is capable of answering various what-if questions. It is designed to run on microcomputers to take advantage of the low-cost computing power. Apart from being a decision aid for use in the factory, the DSS can also be used in the classroom as a simple software tool for computing heuristic solutions to the classical dynamic lot-sizing problem.