  Lean manufacturing is a production method focused on reducing production
times, eliminating waste, and synchronizing production with fluctuating demand.
A standard lean manufacturing methodology is the product wheel, a repeating
sequence of production of various items. If this product wheel sequence is
short, it is easier to interrupt or alter production to adjust for failures or
fluctuations in demand, so the manufacturing process is leaner. However, a
sequence that is too short results in frequent changeover from the production
of one item to the next, yielding higher costs. This study formulates the
product wheel methodology as an optimization problem and proposes two
approaches to solving this problem: one via a relaxation to integer linear
programming, and another via the probabilistic optimization technique of
simulated annealing. We assess the performance of these two approaches through
simulations and analyze the relationships between production leanness and
costs.
