Analysis of the floating bottleneck in pull production systems

Significant research has been performed regarding the concept of a single bottleneck. However, this same research has illustrated that there may be a "floating" bottleneck in the process. This floating bottleneck moves to various stations due to variation within the workstations in the system. This thesis has focused on how to identify the floating bottleneck in the system so that industry may have a better understanding of their system. A literature review is conducted which discusses the impact of bottlenecks, how to schedule bottlenecks, and how to buffer bottlenecks. This is followed by research to identify when a process may have a floating bottleneck. Experiments were conducted utilizing simulation modeling to make explicit the concept of a floating bottleneck.