| Article ID: | iaor2001700 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 22 |
| Issue: | 4/5 |
| Start Page Number: | 129 |
| End Page Number: | 135 |
| Publication Date: | May 1998 |
| Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
| Authors: | Balinski M., Shahidi N. |
New simple solutions are provided for minimizing the variation of production rates in just-in-time systems. The approach depends on the fact that this problem is equivalent to the problem of apportionment. Using known results in apportionment and a new characterization of methods that yield ‘cyclic’ solutions, a particularly apt solution emerges for the ‘production variation problem’.