KITTING IN MULTIECHELON, MULTIPRODUCT ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS WITH PARTS SUBSTITUTABLE

The kitting problem in multi-echelon, multi-product assembly systems w ith parts substitutable is to allocate on-hand stock and expected futu re deliveries to kits to minimize total cost-including job earliness, job tardiness, and in-process holding cost-while considering shop capa city and subassembly precedence restrictions, and parts being substitu table. This class of problem is NP-hard. When dealing with a large ins tance encountered in industry, in the worst case, it may not be possib le to obtain an optimal solution in a reasonable time. In this paper, rules for using part substitutes along with heuristic procedure are pr esented. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic outperforms others tested. It is expected that the new heuristic can be applied in resolving large-scale kitting problems encountered in in dustry to allocate available resources near optimality to enhance sche dule performance and to lower the total cost of operating multi-echelo n, multi-product assembly systems.