Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments July 28, 2016 erstellt
Beschreibung:
The concept of the capacity of a process and the associated managerial insights on capacity investment and capacity management are of fundamental importance in Operations Management. In this paper, we show that the problem of finding the capacity of a process that produces a single product is strongly NP-hard. This result is based on a novel characterization, which we establish, of process capacity that relates it to the fractional chromatic number of an associated graph. Furthermore, we show that it is also hard to efficiently approximate process capacity to within a reasonable factor; e.g., within any constant factor. Most OM textbooks use the following simple approximation to study process capacity: the capacity of each resource is first calculated by examining that resource in isolation; process capacity is then defined as the smallest (bottleneck) among the capacities of the resources. In addition to showing that this approximation is unsatisfactory in general, our results also show that it is unlikely that we can replace this approximation with another simple but close approximation of process capacity