USING TABU SEARCH TO DETERMINE THE NUMBER OF KANBANS AND LOTSIZES IN A GENERIC KANBAN SYSTEM

A generic kanban system designed for non-repetitive manufacturing envi ronments is described. The purpose of this paper is to determine the n umber of kanbans and lotsizes to maximize system performance. System o bjectives include minimizing cycle time, operation costs and capital l osses. A scalar multi-attribute utility function is constructed and a tabu search algorithm is proposed to search for the optimal utility va lue. Simulation is used to generate objective function values for each system setup. Four different variations of tabu search are employed. It is shown that a random sampling of the neighborhood provides good r esults with the shortest computation time. The tabu search algorithm p roposed performs much better than a local search. The results are then compared to those from a modified simulated annealing algorithm. Due to the planar nature of the objective function, it is shown that tabu search can provide excellent results, yet a simulated annealing approa ch provides the same results with better computation time.