In recent years, it has become widely accepted that optimal supply chain design depends on the type of product the chain is catering to. Moreover, as opposed to carrying one product type only, firms deliver a variety of both functional and innovative products in parallel, complicating...

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower bound on the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service time distributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF) discretizes the...