Determination of the number of containers, production kanbans and withdrawal kanbans; and scheduling in kanban flowshops - Part 2

We consider the problem of determination of the number of containers or con tainer size, production kanbans and withdrawal kanbans, and scheduling of c ontainers in presence of material handling between workstations, and dual b locking mechanisms operative on both workstations and material handling. A heuristic is proposed to address the problem of determining the number of c ontainers, and production and withdrawal kanbans, and also determining the sequence of containers to minimize the sum of weighted flowtime, weighted e arliness and weighted tardiness of containers. Recursive equations, develop ed in part 1 of this paper, are used for time-tabling of the sequence of co ntainers. An extensive performance evaluation of the heuristic and a benchm ark procedure, based on random search, has been carried out by generating a number of problems of various sizes.