A Batch Sizing Heuristic for Processes with Quality Losses

摘要

This paper presents a model and heuristic for determining starting batch sizes for the production of a discretequantity of a "made-to-order" product subject to quality losses at each stage of the process. This model of thesingle-period, multi-stage batch sizing problem assumes the yield at each operation is binomial. The starting batchsizes are determined such that an expected profit function is maximized. The proposed heuristic solution procedureutilizes an iterative marginal improvement search algorithm. Using numerical examples, the effectiveness of themodel and heuristic procedure is evaluated by comparing the heuristic solutions to the optimal solutions achievedthrough explicit enumeration.