Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 1999
A recent interesting paper (Cooper, Niu, and Srinivasan [2]) shows how for some cyclic production systems reducing setup times can surprisingly increase work in process. There the authors show how in these situations the introduction of forced idle time can be used to optimize system performance. Here we show that introducing forced idle time at different points during the production cycle can further improve performance in these situations and also in situations where the suggestions from [2] yield no improvement.