Considering decision maker ideas in product mix problems by goal programming

Theory of Constraints is an approach to production planning and control that emphasizes on the constraints to increase throughput. One of the applications in theory of constraints is product mix decision. This paper presents an alternative approach by using a goal programming to determine the product mix of the manufacturing system. The objective of this paper is to provide a methodology in order to make product mix decision. The key point of the proposed methodology is to allow decision makers to determine the importance of throughput and bottleneck machines via pair-wise comparison. Through an example, the inefficiency of theory of constraints in multiple bottleneck problems has been shown. Comparison of theory of constraints, linear programming and other methods has also been discussed to show the advantages of proposed method.