Theory of constraints driven approach to tackle product mix problem with joint material

Determining the type and quantity of products to produce holds critical significance in multi-product manufacturing systems. this problem has been named the product mix problem. several heuristics have been frequently applied to solve the product mix problems. the previous heuristics lead to ineffective decisions when joint material costs are allocated to single products. this paper seeks to establish a new constructive heuristic derived from the theory of constraints (toc) to tackle problem of product mix with joint material. a comparison is done between the traditional toc-based approach, modified toc-based approach, integer linear programming, and proposed constructive heuristic. the provided numerical example illustrates the reasonableness and applicability of the proposed method.