A review of lot streaming

In this paper we present a review of the literature on lot streaming. Lot streaming is a technique that accelerates the flow of a product through a production system by splitting its production lot into sublots and then processing the sublots simultaneously over the machines, thereby reducing the work-in-process and cycle time. We divide the work presented in the literature into two categories on the basis of whether the objective function used is time-based or cost-based. We use a classification scheme to represent various lot-streaming problems. Lot streaming has been applied for the processing of jobs in a variety of machine configurations, including flow shops, job shops, open shops, parallel machines, and hybrid flow shops, even though the bulk of studies have been devoted to flow shop scheduling problems. We have also included the use of lot streaming in an assembly environment in which the subassemblies supplied by the vendors at the first stage are assembled in the second stage, and this constitutes some of the latest work reported in this area. We also provide directions for future research on lot streaming.