The Silver–Meal heuristic is a production planning method in manufacturing, composed in 1973[1] by Edward A.
Its purpose is to determine production quantities to meet the requirement of operations at minimum cost.
The method is an approximate heuristic for the dynamic lot-size model, perceived as computationally too complex.
[citation needed] The Silver–Meal heuristic is a forward method that requires determining the average cost per period as a function of the number of periods the current order is to span and stopping the computation when this function first increases.
Once C(j) > C(j − 1), stop and produce r1 + r2 + r3 + ... + rj − 1 And, begin the process again starting from period j.