On Upper Bound for the Bottleneck Product Rate Variation Problem

Abstract

The problem of minimizing the maximum deviation between the actual and the ideal cumulative production of a variety of models of a common base product, commonly known as the bottleneck product rate variation problem, arises as a sequencing problem in mixed-model just-in-time production systems. The problem has been extensively studied in the literature with several pseudo-polynomial exact algorithms and heuristics. In this paper, we estimate an improved largest function value of a feasible solution for the problem when the mth power of the maximum deviation between the actual and the ideal cumulative productions has to be minimized.