Abstract
Goal: This paper aims to facilitate production-planning strategies for demand responsiveness. Our paper implements graph-rewriting systems towards supporting operative decision making in production environments.
 Design/Methodology/Approach: We design a decision support approach which is able to recognize and resolve conflicts amongst workstations in a hybrid production system. During the proposed stages of the presented approach, we rewrite the hybrid system by means of graph representation procedure, identify conflicts among the workstations by means of the developed graph coloring algorithm, and evaluate performance of the reorganized system by defining key performance indicators for the presented system.
 Results: We prove that the graphs’ chromatic numbers in such systems are less than or equal to entire number of dummy nodes applied to the system by means of our proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the presented structure improves the performance of the system by analyzing production bottlenecks.
 Limitations of the investigations: we only considered the Key Performance Indicators according to products, workstations, and customers. However, the problem can be more generalized by adding some more elements.
 Practical Implications: Our methodology enables managers to assess the performance of the reorganized system after applying the heuristic algorithm, by means of representing a performance evaluation procedure.
 Originality/ Value: We focus on presenting a novel structure to help companies using hybrid make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO) production strategies to (1) identify conflicting workstations and the relations among them, (2) propose dialectical prioritization rules and techniques by means of graph-coloring concepts for resolving the conflicts, (3) reorganize the system, and evaluate performance.
Highlights
Graph coloring is a useful concept that is able to simplify the structure of hybrid manufacturing systems
To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time that this idea is being represented and the application of coloring theory in hybrid manufacturing environment has not yet been investigated in the literature
It may become as one of the most attractive subjects in the field of production and operations research. Having these considerations taken into account, in this paper we embark on introducing a decision support approach, which takes the advantages of graph coloring to identify the relations among workstations of a production line in order to develop a strategic plan of what the company will come up against in the future
Summary
Literature survey of this paper indicates that there is a need to dedicate research works to the development of techniques and methodologies for conflict recognition in manufacturing environments. There is an incredible pressure imposing on industries for bringing new customized products to market faster (Cazeri et al, 2019) This fact in real industrial environments motivates this study to develop a novel approach by incorporating graph coloring and hybrid production strategies’ concepts, that determines the existing conflicts among workplaces and represents corrective actions with the purpose of preventing bottlenecks and balancing the production line. Two consequences are expected from investigation of the model including a set of effective decision policies and mathematical associations among job complication, system structure as well as system’s performance Having all these characteristics taken into account, Performance evaluation of hybrid manufacturing systems is an attractive subject. Furthemore, Flow control is performed with the intention of accomplishing certain goals or preserving proficiency
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