Title: Multi-resource balancing: a case of a German kitchen manufacturer

Authors: Sina Glaeser; Christian Ullrich

Addresses: Department of Business Administration and Economics, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany ' Nobilia-Werke J. Stickling GmbH & Co. KG, Verl, Germany

Abstract: We address a multi-resource balancing-problem at Nobilia-Werke J. Stickling GmbH & Co. KG, the leading kitchen manufacturer in Germany. Nobilia maintains no warehouse for finished goods. The customised cabinets of a kitchen are manufactured in parallel and aggregated just in sequence for loading into trucks immediately after production. A smooth flow of materials is essential to ensure on-time completion and loading of a whole kitchen. Nowadays, changing customer tastes drive customisation. Due to an increasing number of capacity restrictions in its production processes, Nobilia's current planning method has reached its limits. We present an integer programming model to address a variant of the multi-resource generalised assignment problem (MRGAP). We consider a multi-criteria objective function and a set of constraints reflecting Nobilia's requirements. We propose a software-based solution approach for Nobilia's instance sizes. The results of our computational experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our approach provides significant benefits.

Keywords: resource balancing; integer programming; multi-criteria; production planning; machine assignment; mass customisation; generalised assignment problem; GAP; real-world application; LINGO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2022.127136

International Journal of Operational Research, 2022 Vol.45 No.3, pp.283 - 299

Received: 03 Jul 2019
Accepted: 09 Jan 2020
Published online: 23 Nov 2022 *

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