You are working at a factory manufacturing many different products. Products have to be processed on a number of different machine tools. Machine shops with these machines are connected with conveyor lines to exchange unfinished products. Each unfinished product is transferred from a machine shop to another through one or more of these conveyors.
As the orders of the processes required are not the same for different types of products, the conveyor lines are currently operated in two-way. This may induce inefficiency as conveyors have to be completely emptied before switching their directions. Kaizen (efficiency improvements) may be found here!
Adding more conveyors is too costly. If all the required transfers are possible with currently installed conveyors operating in fixed directions, no additional costs are required. All the required transfers, from which machine shop to which, are listed at hand. You want to know whether all the required transfers can be enabled with all the conveyors operated in one-way, and if yes, directions of the conveyor lines enabling it.