Systematic procedure for leveling of low volume and high mix production

The application of conventional leveling approaches is limited to large scale production. This paper presents a systematic procedure for leveling of low volume and high mix production. It employs clustering techniques to group product types into product families. After that, a family-based leveling pattern is created which describes a repetitive sequence of capacity slots considering all families. According to the leveling pattern, each family is manufactured within a periodic interval. The paper provides a brief overview of the systematic procedure. It focuses on the creation of the leveling pattern using operations research methods and presents a real life application. (C) 2012 CIRP.