OPTIMAL PRODUCTION SEQUENCE FOR A PRODUCT WITH MATCHING COMPONENTS

In the manufacture of mechanical heart valves, very high precision man ufacturing and quality control is an absolute necessity. Since a mecha nical heart valve consists of a number of components, it is imperative that the components match precisely. Motivated by this need in heart valve manufacturing, we study a new production control model for a pro duct comprised of matching components. The model is also applicable to other production systems for manufacturing high precision products re quiring careful matching of components. For a two-component case, we p rove that a ''greedy'' production sequencing rule is optimal. Based on this result, we then develop an effective greedy heuristic sequencing rule for more general cases. An extensive empirical study is used to evaluate the performance of this and one other heuristic rule.