An assembly-type supply chain system controlled by kanbans under a just-in-time delivery policy

This research studies the assembly-type supply chain system controlled by kanban mechanism. First, a supply chain system is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. A composite formulation of the assembly-type supply chain system is developed by appropriately aggregating the individual branch models as a whole system. The batch size, the number of batches, and the total quantity over one period in the mainline and each branch line are determined. The small size MINLP problems are solved optimally by a branch-and-bound method. For the large size MINLP problems, a heuristic is developed which divides the ATSCS into several small size problems, and then conquers them individually. Next, the kanban operation between two adjacent plants is developed to schedule the loading and unloading, and transportation. Coupled with plant-wide efforts for cost control and management commitment, a logistics system is built for controlling the production as well as the supply chain system, which results in minimizing the total cost of the supply chain system. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the two heuristic procedures and a better solution is obtained for the ATSCS problem. (C) 2003 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.