Determination of the number of containers, production kanbans and withdrawal kanbans; and scheduling in kanban flowshops - Part 1

In the first part of this paper, we consider a kanban-controlled flowshop a nd present recursive equations for time-tabling of containers in a given se quence. The flowshop is characterized by the following: a production batch of a part-type (or job) divided into kanban lots or containers; production kanbans to control the loading of containers on machines or workstations; w ithdrawal kanbans to regulate the movement of containers between two consec utive buffer storages; periodic material handling of containers; dual block ing mechanisms operative on workstations and material handling; and sequenc e-dependent set-up times of containers. Considering different types of prob lems, recursive equations have been developed for time-tabling of container s in a given sequence.