Bottleneck shop

In a bottleneck shop, one work center has a significantly higher load than others. 

Most researchers base their experiments on balanced shops while a few consider both balanced and bottleneck shops [104] [105]. In general, two consecutive operations on the same machine are not permitted (exceptions include [83]), and there are two alternatives for repeated machines on a routing (1) a job can return to a machine after being processed on another machine [33] [37] [39] [60] [104] [105], and (2) each job has at most one operation in each work center [106] [107]. 

A rational layout of the temporary facilities (offices, change houses, shops, parking lots, layout areas, etc.) enhances labor productivity and has a favorable impact on project costs and schedule. One of the main responsibilities of the C.M. is to lay out the temporary facilities in an efficient manner to minimize the distance the workers have to walk from the gate to the work areas and design traffic patterns to avoid jams and bottlenecks. 

The balance control of an apparel assembly line relies heavily on the shop-floor expert s knowledge, experience and intuition. The effectiveness of a decision depends on the subjective and ad hoc assessment of production line supervisors. Small order size and frequent changes of styles can make the matter even worse for optimal production control. With the recent development and adoption of real-time shop-floor data capture systems, real-time production statistics and progress reports can be generated to assist production line supervisors in line balancing control and bottleneck elimination. However, their deeisions may not be consistent even under similar conditions and may thus be non-optimal. 

J. Adams, E. Balas, and D. Zawack. The shifting bottleneck procedure for job shop scheduling. Management Science, 34 391-401, 1988. 

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