Evaluation of production control strategies for negligible-setup, multi-product, serial lines with consideration for robustness

Purpose - The aims of this paper is to investigate simulation-based optimisation and stochastic dominance testing while employing kanban-like production control strategies (PCS) operating dedicated and, where applicable, shared kanban card allocation policies in a multi-product system with negligible set-up times and with consideration for robustness to uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach - Discrete event simulation and a genetic algorithm were utilised to optimise the control parameters for dedicated kanban control strategy (KCS), CONWIP and base stock control strategy (BSCS), extended kanban control strategy (EKCS) and generalised kanban control strategy (GKCS) as well as the shared versions of EKCS and GKCS. All-pairwise comparisons and a ranking and selection technique were employed to compare the performances of the strategies and select the best strategy without consideration of robustness to uncertainty. A latin hypercube sampling experimental design and stochastic dominance testing were utilised to determine the preferred strategy when robustness to uncertainty is considered. Findings - The findings of this work show that shared GKCS outperforms other strategies when robustness is not considered. However, when robustness of the strategies to uncertainty in the production environment is considered, the results of our research show that the dedicated EKCS is preferred. The effect of system bottleneck location on the inventory accumulation behaviour of different strategies is reported and this was also observed to have a relationship to the nature of a PCS's kanban information transmission. Practical implications - The findings of this study are directly relevant to industry where increasing market pressures for product diversity require operating multi-product production lines with negligible set-up times. The optimization and robustness test approaches employed in this work can be extended to the analysis of more complicated system configurations and higher number of product types. Originality/value - This work involves further investigation into the performance of multi-product kanban-like PCS by examining their robustness to common sources of uncertainties after they have been initially optimized for base scenarios. The results of the robustness tests also provide new insights into how dedicated kanban card allocation policies might offer higher flexibility and robustness over shared policies under conditions of uncertainty.