Effects of strategic lot-splitting in various manufacturing environments

A very simple lot-splitting rule, one tractable in any job shop, is presented. Its performance under identical conditions where the lot-splitting provision is removed is also examined. It is found that for all combinations of environment, routing strategy, and shop load, the lot-splitting provision offers a significant improvement in job timeliness at a modest increase in processing costs, despite the conventional wisdom that additional setups, especially at bottleneck machines, could further clog job throughput. The effect is more pronounced where there are greater imbalances in machine utilization