A quantitative approach to estimate the size of the time buffer in the theory of constraints

Radovilsky, Zinovy

doi:10.1016/s0925-5273(97)00131-x

Cited by 63 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Buffers are time (e.g. Radovilsky, 1998;Schragenheim & Ronen, 1990;Simons & Simpson, 1997;Chakravorty & Atwater, 2005) or a time-equivalent amount of work-in-process. Since, in our study, jobs are considered to be delivered immediately after they are completed, the shipping buffer does not exist.…”

Section: Drum-buffer-rope (Dbr) and The Theory Of Constraints (Toc)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing bottleneck shiftiness: the impact of bottleneck position on order release control in pure flow shops

Thürer

Stevenson

et al. 2017

Production Planning & Control

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Bottleneck shiftiness is an important managerial problem that negatively affects shop floor manageability. It has therefore received much research attention. Yet research has focused on how protective capacity can be used to influence bottleneck shiftiness rather than on assessing its operational impact. The latter is complex to evaluate since changing the degree of bottleneck shiftiness influences utilization, which makes the results of different experimental settings non-comparable. To overcome this problem, we take a different approach. Bottleneck shiftiness is decomposed by investigating its underlying phenomenon: the impact of the bottleneck position. Using a simulation model of a pure flow shop, we demonstrate that the bottleneck position has a negligible impact on performance if jobs are released immediately and control is exercised by a dispatching rule. But when order release is controlled, the bottleneck position does impact performance -tighter control can be exercised, and better performance achieved, the further upstream the bottleneck is positioned.Hence, control parameters need to be adjusted. Further, results show that it is important to be aware of the direction of the bottleneck shift. If the bottleneck shifts upstream (from the current bottleneck), performance is likely to improve rather than deteriorate as is implicitly assumed in the literature.

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Section: Drum-buffer-rope (Dbr) and The Theory Of Constraints (Toc)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing bottleneck shiftiness: the impact of bottleneck position on order release control in pure flow shops

Thürer

Stevenson

et al. 2017

Production Planning & Control

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“…Many different methods were applied to solve the authors proposed models in TOC and DBR approaches. Although Radovilsky (1998) formulated a single-server queue in calculating the optimal size of the time buffer in TOC and Miltenburg (1997) compared JIT, MRP and TOC by using of the Markov model. We could not find a paper of the DBR technique in the job shop environment by queuing theory.…”

Section: The Proposed Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Markov chain analysis of the effectiveness of drum-buffer-rope material flow management in job shop environment

Rabbani

Tanhaie²

2015

10.5267/j.ijiec

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The theory of constraints is an approach for production planning and control, which emphasizes on the constraints in the system to increase throughput. The theory of constraints is often referred to as Drum-Buffer-Rope developed originally by Goldratt. Drum-Buffer-Rope uses the drum or constraint to create a schedule based on the finite capacity of the first bottleneck. Because of complexity of the job shop environment, Drum-Buffer-Rope material flow management has very little attention to job shop environment. The objective of this paper is to apply the Drum-BufferRope technique in the job shop environment using a Markov chain analysis to compare traditional method with Drum-Buffer-Rope. Four measurement parameters were considered and the result showed the advantage of Drum-Buffer-Rope approach compared with traditional one.

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“…Determining the appropriate level of buffers is an ongoing research area; for instance see Radovilsky (1998), Gunn and Nahavandi (2000), Louw andPage (2004), andYe (2007).…”

Section: Process Of Ongoing Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Buffer management is a related TOC application that determines the size and monitors the status of buffers. Determining the appropriate level of buffers is an ongoing research area; for instances, see Radovilsky (1998), Gunn and Nahavandi (2000), Louw and Page (2004), and Ye There are two main types of buffers. Time buffers, physically represented by the amount of work-in-progress inventory (Watson et al, 2007), protect the constraint from disruptions at nonconstraint resources (Rahman, 1998).…”

Section: Fundamentals Of Toc and Dbrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of constraints for publicly funded health systems

Sadat

Carter

Golden

2012

Health Care Manag Sci

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This thesis aims to fill the gaps in the literature of the theory of constraints (TOC) in publicly funded health systems. While TOC seems to be a natural fit for this resource-constrained environment, there are still no reported application of TOC's drum-buffer-rope tool and inadequate customizations with regards to defining system-wide goal and performance measures.The "Drum-Buffer-Rope for an Outpatient Cancer Facility" chapter is a real world case study exploring the usefulness of TOC's drum-buffer-rope scheduling technique in a publicly funded outpatient cancer facility. With the use of a discrete event simulation model populated with historical data, the drum-buffer-rope scheduling policy is compared against "high constraint utilization" and "low wait time" scenarios. Drum-buffer-rope proved to be an effective mechanism in balancing the inherent tradeoff between the two performance measures of instances of delayed treatment and average patient wait time. To find the appropriate level of compromise in one performance measure in favor of the other, the linkage of these measures to system-wide performance measures are proposed.In the "Theory of Constraints' Performance Measures for Publicly Funded Health Systems" chapter, a system dynamics representation of the classical TOC's system-wide goal and performance measures for publicly traded for-profit companies is developed, which forms the iii basis for developing a similar model for publicly funded health systems. The model is then expanded to include some of the factors that affect system performance, providing a framework to apply TOC's process of ongoing improvement in publicly funded health systems.The "Connecting Low-Level Performance Measures to the Goal" chapter attempts to provide a framework to link the low-level performance measures with system-wide performance measures.It is claimed that until such a linkage is adequately established, TOC has not been fully transferred to publicly funded health systems.iv

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A quantitative approach to estimate the size of the time buffer in the theory of constraints

Cited by 63 publications

References 4 publications

Deconstructing bottleneck shiftiness: the impact of bottleneck position on order release control in pure flow shops

Deconstructing bottleneck shiftiness: the impact of bottleneck position on order release control in pure flow shops

A Markov chain analysis of the effectiveness of drum-buffer-rope material flow management in job shop environment

Theory of constraints for publicly funded health systems

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