The Theory of a Method of Production Scheduling When there are Many Products

Suppose that there is a single-stage process, possibly with several machines in parallel. Each machine can produce a variety of products and a change of product can, at a cost, be made without restriction. It is assumed that, because of random variations in sales rates, a cyclic scheme of production is not practicable. A modification of the classical square-root formula for lot-size is found that allows for the “interference” between different products. Numerical examples are given in section 8 and the general conditions under which the scheduling scheme of this paper is likely to be efficient are discussed in section 9.