Setting inventory levels of CONWIP ow lines vialinear programming

This paper treats the problem of setting the inventory level of closed-loop owlines operating under the constant-work-in-process (CONWIP) protocol. We solve ahuge but simple linear program that models an entire simulation run of a closed-loopow line in discrete time to determine a production rate estimate of the system. Thisnew approach has been introduced in Helber et al. (2008) for open ow lines withlimited buer capacities. In this paper we present numerical results of the methodfor closed-loop CONWIP ow lines.[...]