Performance of TOC based finite capacity material requirement planning system for a multi-stage assembly factory

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a finite capacity material requirement planning (FCMRP) system based on TOC philosophy (TOC-MRP) for multi-stage assembly factory that has some bottleneck stations. The proposed TOC-MRP system tries to load and schedule operations on bottleneck stations in a manner that they are free of idle time and overtime. The schedules on non-bottleneck stations will be arranged until they are not conflicting with those on the bottleneck stations. The non-bottleneck stations are allowed to have idle time and overtime if necessary. To analyse whether TOC-MRP is effective, it is compared with a FCMRP method that does not adopt TOC philosophy. The experimental results reveal that the TOC-MRP outperforms the FCMRP without TOC philosophy.

Keywords:

• Material requirement planning
• Finite capacity
• Theory of constraints
• Goal programming
• Application in industry

Acknowledgement

This research has been supported by the Royal Golden Jubilee PhD Program of Thailand Research Fund, Contract No. PHD/0026/2543.