Setting Planned Leadtimes in Customer-Order-Driven Assembly Systems

摘要

We study an assembly system with a number of parallel multistage processes feeding a multistage final assembly process. Each stage has a stochastic throughput time. We assume that the system is controlled by planned leadtimes at each stage. From these planned leadtimes the start and due times of all stages can be derived. If a job finishes at a particular stage and has to wait before the start of the next job(s), a holding cost proportional to the waiting time is incurred. A penalty cost proportional to the lateness is incurred when the last stage of the final assembly process finishes after its due time. The objective is to determine planned leadtimes for each individual stage, such that the expected cost of a customer order is minimized.