A double decoupling postponement approach for integrated mixed flow production systems

Abstract

Purpose

In a mixed flow production environment, interactions between production planning and scheduling are critical for mixed flow distributed manufacturing management. The purpose of this paper is to assist manufacturers in achieving real-time ordering and obtaining integrated optimization of shop floor production planning and scheduling for mixed flow production systems.

Design/methodology/approach

A double decoupling postponement (DDP) approach is presented for production dispatch control, and an integrated model is designed under an assemble to order (ATO) environment. To generate “optimal” lots to fulfil real-time customer requests, constant work in progress (CONWIP) and days of inventory dispatching algorithms are embedded into the proposed DDP model, which can deal with real-time ordering and dynamic scheduling simultaneously. Subsequently, a case study is conducted, and experiments are carried out to verify the presented method.

Findings

The proposed DDP model is designed to upgrade a previous CONWIP method in the case study company, and the proposed model demonstrates better performance for the integration of production planning and scheduling in mixed flow manufacturing. As a result, the presented operation mechanism can reflect real-time ordering information to shop floor scheduling and obtain performance metrics in terms of reliability, availability and maintainability.

Research limitations/implications

The presented model can be further proliferated to generic factory manufacturing with the proposed logic and architecture.

Originality/value

The DDP model can integrate real-time customer orders and work in process information, upon which manufacturers can make correct decisions for dispatch strategies and order selection within an integrated system.

Citation

Ni, Y. and Wang, Y. (2015), "A double decoupling postponement approach for integrated mixed flow production systems", Kybernetes, Vol. 44 No. 5, pp. 705-720. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-10-2014-0229