Article ID: | iaor20021729 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 29 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 115 |
End Page Number: | 121 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2001 |
Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
Authors: | Shanthikumar J. George, Righter Rhonda |
Keywords: | manufacturing industries |
We consider the effect of changes in the order of operations in a chain of manufacturing operations in which product differentiation increases at each operation of the chain. We investigate several measures for evaluating the performance of such a chain, and show that the optimal ordering of the operations depends critically on the performance measure. We give a unified treatment of earlier results that provides new intuition. We then extend these results to an explicit cost-minimization model.