Production batch sizing at multi-product bottleneck machines

In common manufacturing systems, there exist bottleneck machines that limit the capacity of the entire system. This paper addresses a batch sizing problem at the bottleneck machines in which various product types are processed. Koo et al. (2006) have presented a batch sizing model at single-product bottleneck machines. This paper is an extension to the previous research work where multiple products are taken into explicit considerations in batch sizing. We introduce a linear search algorithm to find optimal throughput rate and batch size at the same time. Numerical examples are provided to see how the proposed method works.