The Engineering Change of the Total Requirements Matrix for a Bill of Materials

Matrix methods for various “bill of materials” computations have been described in papers by Vazsonyi [Vazsonyi, A. 1954. The use of mathematics in production and inventory control. Management Sci.1 (1, October) 70–85; Vazsonyi, A. 1958. Scientific Programming in Business and Industry. Wiley, 429–452.], Vazsonyi and Larson [Vazsonyi, A., H. T. Larson. 1955. Data-processor requirements in production and inventory control. Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, 48–61.], and Giffler [Giffler, B. Mathematical solution of production planning and scheduling problems. IBM Technical Report 09.01028.026.]. Wide-spread use of these ideas has been hampered by the large amount of computation that the basic “total-requirements” matrix T involves. In this paper, a new and efficient iterative method for engineering changes of T is discussed, and this method is applied to the original generation of T, and to the inversion of certain matrices.