Managing an assembly production process with a proper control policy Online publication date: Thu, 27-Nov-2014
by Yaghoub Khojasteh-Ghamari, Ryo Sato
International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management (IJMTM), Vol. 22, No. 1, 2011
Abstract: To control the production of parts in a production process, managers can choose a proper control policy. In this paper, we study the performance of three control policies, kanban, CONWIP and base-stock in a single-product production process. The performance measures are system throughput and work-in-process (WIP) inventory. Periodic behaviour of a token transaction system is focused on. When the system behaves periodically, Little's law can be used to calculate the performance measures. We provide a performance comparison for those three production control policies in serial production lines as well as in tree-shaped production processes. We compare the minimum WIP of the system for each policy, when the system attains maximum possible throughput. The results show that there is no general superiority among kanban, CONWIP and base-stock. Appropriate design of the whole system decides which one is superior in a certain situation.
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