Glossary · System coordination, integration and orchestration
Bottleneck coordination
Also known as: bottleneck management, constraint management
German: Engpasskoordination
In production control, bottleneck coordination is the practice of controlling a line or plant so that its capacity-limiting station runs as continuously as possible, by keeping buffers before it filled, buffers after it available and other stations paced to it.
- System integration
In one sentence
Bottleneck coordination paces a line around its capacity-limiting station so that this station is never starved or blocked.
Example
The line controller slows the depalletizer when the buffer before the filler is full and speeds it up when the buffer runs low, so the filler, the bottleneck, never stops for lack of containers.
How it applies
- Engineering: Identify the bottleneck from measured data, not from name-plate speeds. Size buffers around it and define the speed curves of the other machines relative to it (often called a V-curve on bottling lines).
- Operation: A lost minute at the bottleneck is a lost minute for the whole line; a lost minute elsewhere may be absorbed by buffers. Maintenance priorities should reflect this.
- Documentation: The line description should name the design bottleneck and explain the pacing logic, so that operators understand why machines deliberately run slower than their maximum.
Bottleneck coordination vs. line balancing
Line balancing distributes work content evenly across stations at design time. Bottleneck coordination manages the remaining imbalance at run time, because no real line is perfectly balanced.