Theory of Constraints and Particle Swarm Optimization Approaches for Product Mix Problem Decision

Theory of constraint (TOC) is a management philosophy that focuses on constraints which limit organization in achieving to its goal. The goal of each organization is to maximize the throughput. The product mix is a major problem and an application of TOC in manufacturing enterprise that includes determination of quantifying and the indentifying of each product to produce. In general, heuristic or meta-heuristic solution methods are used to optimize such problems. Heuristic approaches for these problems include TOC by Goldratt and revised TOC and etc. Sometimes heuristic approaches are inefficient in multi constraints especially in large problems and instead, in these cases meta-heuristic algorithms have been applied extensively. In this paper a proposed particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied for solving the product mix optimization problem. Also, the results obtained from the proposed PSO are compared with the results of other approaches