A new heuristic approach to solve product mix problems in a multi-bottleneck system

Product mix problem (pmp) is one of the most important and complicated problems in production systems.different approaches have been applied to solve this problem, among them, theory of constraints (toc) hasbeen widely considered since 1990s. this paper develops a distinguished algorithm to solve product mix problemsthat is efficient both in single and multi-bottleneck problems. at first, the new algorithm uses a mathematicalmodel to aggregate different priorities assigned to products by different bottlenecks and finds an initialsolution. then tries to improve the solution by solving a set of linear inequalities. it is shown that the newapproach obtains better solutions than the previous algorithms.