Sequencing units on a production or assembly line in order to attenuate the variations in the rates of resource consumption is a problem that has received growing attention in recent years. The present study features an analysis of the PRV (Product Rate Variation) problem with quadratic discrepancy function. Taking advantage of the properties satisfied by any optimum sequence, efficiency of sev...

Production processes in a wide range of industries rely on modern mixed-model assembly systems, which allow an efficient manufacture of various models of a common base product on the same assembly line. In order to facilitate a just-in-time supply of materials, the literature proposes various sequencing problems under the term “level scheduling”, which all aim at evenly smoothing the part consu...

Variation management in a software product line is a multi-dimensional configuration management problem. In addition to the conventional configuration management problem of managing variation over time, software product lines also have the problem of managing variation among the the individual products in the domain space. In this paper, we illustrate how to “divide and conquer” the variation m...

Batch sizing in different planning period is categorized as a classical problem in production planning, that so many exact & heuristic methods have been proposed to solve this problem, each of which considering various aspects of the original problem. The solution obtained from majority – e.g. MRP – is in this format that there may be some periods of idleness or each period should produce a...

Consider the Product Rate Variation problem. Given n products 1, ..., i, ..., n, and n positive integer demands d1, ..., di, ..., dn. Find a sequence α = α1, ..., αT , T = ∑n i=1 di, of the products, where product i occurs exactly di times that always keeps the actual production level, equal the number of product i occurrences in the prefix α1, ..., αt, t = 1, ..., T , and the desired productio...