A New Method to Control Work-in-Process Inventory for High Manufacturing Productivity

摘要

A new method for controlling the WIP inventory is proposed in order to restrict the excessive production of unfinished products, while the manufacturing productivity is kept at a certain high value. Excessive WIPs decrease business profits and prevent the realization of agile manufacturing along with changes in markets, while insufficient number of WIPs reduce manufacturing productivity and flexibility to cope with malfunctions of production resources. Theoretical formulations of a scheduling problem without buffer is derived, and heuristic procedure is adopted to plan a feasible schedule. The proposed control methods are verified by computational simulations regarding job-shop type production system.