earticle

영어

Kanban pull system uses card sets to tightly control work-in-process (WIP) between each pair of workstations. Total system WIP is limited to the summation of the number of cards in each card set. Production occurs at a workstation only if raw material is available and the material has a card authorizing production. This paper showed that kanban-controlled line production system is equivalent to a m-node tandem queue with finite buffers. A max-plus algebra based solution method for the tandem queue was used to find the kanban system performance measures. A numerical example of kanban system with 6 workstations was used to demonstrate the analysis. Two optimization problems were solved: one that determines the minimum number of kanbans with given quality of service levels and one that determines the maximum throughput with given number of kanbans. We also analyzed how sequencing workstation affects the performance measures. The line production system where workstations arranged in decreasing order of their processing times was found to be the best configuration in terms of sojourn time and WIP level. Further studies on non-saturated demand case are needed.