Pull control of material supply for low-volume assembly lines: a reorder point method for aerospace manufacturing

Abstract

In many medium- and high-volume assembly environments, e.g., automobile manufacturing, pull control of material supply facilitates resilient and lean manufacturing processes through consumption-based replenishment in aggregated quantities of one or more complete material requirements of an assembly cycle. However, in material-intensive low-volume environments such as aerospace manufacturing, this aggregation at the assembly level would lead to excessive supply; thus, material must be replenished gradually over an assembly cycle. The relevant research is limited, and grouping-based principles proposed for such environments can lead to suboptimal task aggregation and undesirable preemption. This paper presents a reorder-point-based pull control method that enables highly precise replenishment. It was developed and evaluated through a simulation study of a wing assembly line for large passenger aircraft. The simulation results suggest that the proposed method is highly effective for the complex assembly environment investigated and can reduce work in process even further than existing methods.