Shifting economic bottleneck identification

Shifting economic bottleneck identification aims to improve the overall throughput of manufacturing system. Firstly the two new concepts, throughput sensitivity of machine and corresponding economic bottleneck, are mathematically defined. Secondly considering both throughput effect and active duration of machine, a new two-dimensional bottleneck indicator named active throughput and duration (ATD) is presented and new concave-convex Gantt chart is given for scheduling representation. Thirdly the shifting economic bottleneck identification (SEBI) method is presented to identify either the momentary economic bottleneck or statistically stable bottleneck. What´s more, it also works well when facing the sole economic bottleneck, multiple economic bottlenecks and shifting economic bottleneck. Finally a practical job shop scheduling problem is optimized and the bottleneck identification is gained by the proposed method. Also a comparison between the proposed method and existing method is made. The results show that the proposed approach is effective and explicit for shifting economic bottleneck identification.