Kc. So, OPTIMAL BUFFER ALLOCATION STRATEGY FOR MINIMIZING WORK-IN-PROCESS INVENTORY IN UNPACED PRODUCTION LINES, IIE transactions, 29(1), 1997, pp. 81-88
Citations number
17
Categorie Soggetti
Operatione Research & Management Science","Engineering, Industrial
Several researchers have previously studied the problem of allocating
buffer storage to maximize the throughput of a production line for a g
iven total amount of buffer space. In this paper we study the optimal
buffer allocation problem of minimizing the average work-in-process su
bject to a minimum required throughput and a constraint on the total b
uffer space. Although these two buffer allocation problems are closely
related, our results show, surprisingly, that their optimal buffer al
locations have very different patterns. Specifically, we show that the
optimal buffer allocations for the problem considered here generally
exhibit a monotonically increasing property where an increasing amount
of buffer space is assigned toward the end of the line. This monotoni
cally increasing property generally holds for both the balanced and un
balanced lines. On the basis of our empirical results, we develop a go
od heuristic for selecting the optimal buffer allocations.