Capacity planning in manufacturing networks with discrete options

We 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, we rely on approximate analyses based on the decomposition approach developed, among others, by Reiser and Kobayashi 16], Kuehn 14], Shanthikumar and Buzacott 19], Whitt 29], and extensions by Bitran and Tirupati 2]. 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, we present a heuristic to obtain an approximate solution. We also provide bounds on the performance of this heuristic and illustrate our approach by means of a numerical example.