Comments on ‘Deficient EOQ-independent lot-sizing heuristics’

Cheng and Siu (1989) argued that previous economic order quantity (EOQ) related heuristics are inherently flawed, and proposed two lot-sizing heuristics that are relatively tree from EOQ considerations (EOQ-independent). Based on their computational study, it was concluded that EOQ-independent heuristics performed ‘amazingly well’ compared to optimal solutions generated by the Wagner-Whilin algorithm. This comment is a critique of the premise under which the Cheng and Siu study was conducted, illustrates the inadequacy of the test data and errors in the computational results, and compares the performance of their heuristics with two EOQ-based heuristics. It is concluded that the EOQ-independent heuristics of Cheng and Siu are far inferior to existing heuristics in the literature.