Capacity analysis of complex manufacturing facilities

We describe a simple, linear programming based method for analyzing capacity of large and complex manufacturing lines that produce a wide variety of different products. The model we propose is appropriate for answering questions pertaining to the quantity of each product the manufacturing line can or should produce over periods of one month to several years. The model is intended for use by non-technical manufacturing planners and as such, it was designed with several requirements in mind: it should represent the manufacturing line in an easily understandable way; it should provide direct answers to a variety of different capacity related questions; it should take into consideration product cycle times and relevant manufacturing dynamics; and finally it should run quickly so that many "what-if" scenarios can be examined.