AN ANALYTICAL METHOD FOR PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF KANBAN CONTROLLED PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

The aim of this paper is to develop a general purpose analytical metho d for performance evaluation of multistage kanban controlled productio n systems. We consider a single-part type production system decomposed into stages in series. Each stage consists of a manufacturing cell an d an output buffer. With each stage is associated a given number of ka nbans. The kanban controlled production system is modeled as a queuein g network with synchronization mechanisms. The basic principle of the proposed approximation method is to decompose the original kanban syst em into a set of subsystems, each subsystem being associated with a pa rticular stage. Each subsystem is analyzed in isolation using a produc t-form approximation technique. An iterative procedure is then used to determine the unknown parameters of each subsystem. Numerical results show that the method is fairly accurate.