An Efficient Algorithm Based on TOC to Solve Product Mix Problems

摘要

Product mix problem (PMP) is one of the most important and complicated problems in production systems. Proper determination of product mix leads to high level of profit because it specifies the best way of assigning work centers capacity to each product. In other words, it clears how many of each product should be produced in order to reach a high level of profit. Different approaches have been applied to solve this problem, among them, theory of constraints (TOC) has been widely considered since 1990s. This paper develops a distinguished algorithm to solve product mix problems that is efficient both in single and multi-bottleneck problems. At first, the proposed algorithm uses a mathematical model to aggregate different priorities assigned to products by different bottlenecks and finds an initial solution. Then tries to improve the solution by solving a set of linear inequalities. In this paper, it is discussed that the proposed approach reaches better solutions than the previous algorithms.