Manufacturing network flows: A generalized network flow model for manufacturing process modelling

Network flow models have been shown to be theoretically interesting and practically useful. However, an ordinary network flow has its limitation in modelling more complicated manufacturing scenarios, in particular the synthesis of different materials to one product and/or the distilling of one material to many different products. In this paper, we present a generalized network model called manufacturing network flow (MNF) for this purpose. The underlying structure and dual properties of the so-called minimum distribution cost problem is specifically studied to outline a network simplex method for solving this problem.