Psycho-clonal based approach to solve a TOC product mix decision problem

Abstract

In recent years, theory of constraints (TOC) has emerged as an effective management philosophy that has successfully tackled the problems of profit maximization with known demonstrated bottleneck in traditional as well as modern manufacturing plants. One of the key components of TOC application is to enumerate quantity of the various products to be produced keeping in view the system constraints and this is termed as the TOC product mix decision problem. It is a well-known computationally complex problem and thus warrants the application of heuristics technique or AI based optimization tools to achieve near optimal solutions in real time. To accomplish this objective a new algorithm, Psycho-Clonal has been proposed that works on the principle of artificial immune system and behavioral theory, namely Maslow's need hierarchy theory. Intensive computational experiments have been carried out and superiority of proposed heuristic on a given dataset is established. It is observed that results obtained are better compared to what have been achieved by the TOC heuristic, revised theory of constraint heuristic (RTOC), integer linear programming (ILP), and tabu search based approaches.