Preliminaries

Abstract

The situation we will consider is that of a firm, possibly in the process industry, manufacturing a wide variety of products on a make-to-order basis. We are particularly interested in those production processes which have exactly one bottleneck, not only because this situation is quite common, but also because it is the situation that can be analysed best. In our models we will only consider the bottleneck process and exclude the other processes. In a practical situation there will be a lot of aspects that have some importance for the production. We will ignore many of these aspects, because they would complicate the problem considerably, without being an essential element for the control rules for production planning and for the lead times.