Capacity planning in manufacturing networks with discrete options

The authors consider multiproduct manufacturing systems modeled by open networks of queues with general distributions for arrival patterns and service times. Since exact solutions are not available for measuring mean number of jobs in these systems, they rely on approximate analyses based on the decomposition approach developed, among others, by Reiser and Kobayahsi, Kuehn, Shanthikumar and Buzacott, Whitt, and extensions by Bitran and Tirupati. The targeting problem (TP) presented in this paper addresses capacity planning issues in multiproduct manufacturing systems. Since TP is a nonlinear integer program that is not easy to solve, the authors present a heuristic to obtain an approximate solution. They also provide bounds on the performance of this heuristic and illustrate the present approach by means of a numerical example.