An adaptive CONWIP mechanism for hybrid production systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a hybrid production system with two distinct production lines, where one of them undertakesremanufacturingactivitieswhiletheotherexecutes traditional manufacturing tasks. The output of either produc- tion line can satisfy the demand for the same type of product without any penalties. The realization times for demand oc- currences and service completions are random. In order to control such production systems, we propose a single-stage pull type control mechanism with adaptive kanbans and state- independent routing of demand information. The mechanism is modeled as a stochastic queueing network and performance measures are obtained for stationary behavior. Alternative static control policies are compared with the proposed policy with respect to an expected total cost function of these perfor- mance measures. An experimental design of L(2 1 3 7 )c overing low to high traffic densities is utilized for the numerical analysis. The numerical comparison shows that on the aver- age, the adaptive kanban control mechanism in consideration performs 20 % better than the best static kanban control mechanism.