MODELING THE PERFORMANCE OF A KANBAN ASSEMBLY SHOP

A number of design issues must be resolved when the kanban method is i mplemented, including the determination of the number of cards to use, the size of the kanban-lots, and the machine allocation. Objectives m ay include the reduction of work-in-progress, the reduction of makespa n or cycle time and the overall improvement of shop floor planning and control. This paper reports on results obtained using optimization mo dels of the kanban method in an assembly shop to determine the optimal number of kanban cards. Numerical results illustrate the relationship between makespan of an order and the number of kanban cards and indic ate that there is, in practice, an upper bound to the number of cards that should be used with a given kanban-lot size.