The bottleneck sets the pace

Four stations, one line. A part is only as fast as the slowest station, everything else finishes early and waits. Scrub the cycle times: speed a fast station and nothing changes; speed the bottleneck and the whole line speeds up, until the constraint jumps somewhere else. This is the Theory of Constraints, made a set of dials.

Serial line; steady-state throughput = 3600 / max(cycle time). Node-verified: speeding a non-bottleneck leaves throughput unchanged; speeding the bottleneck raises it and shifts the constraint. Built on the reusable probe.js primitive. Runs on your device. · Institute for Physical AI @ JBI