Introduction: Modeling and Analysis for Complex Production Systems. Position Statement

Introduction Modern manufacturing system is experiencing the emergence of a new paradigm wherein increased customization, product proliferation, heterogeneous markets, shorter product life cycle and development time, responsiveness, and other factors are increasingly taking center stage (Bollinger, 1998). For example, in Japan, Toyota was reportedly offering five-day delivery from the time the client designed a customized car on a CAD system (from modular options) to actual product delivery. A characteristic feature of a number of manufacturing industries is the frequency of model change and the considerable amounts of time and cost required to make a changeover. This trend has steadily gone up in the last two decades. For example, since 1980s, US car market's total demand has essentially remained stable, however, the number of nameplates has increased by 35% from 139 to 183, respectively. This increase continued during the 1990s essentially creating a shift in the automotive industry. The newly emerging manufacturing paradigm is characterized by the so-called time-based competition (TBC). The time to market for a new product or service responsiveness of a company is becoming the cutting edge in global market competition (Ulrich, Sartorius, Pearson, and Jakiela, 1993). Taking time as the yardstick, the new standard has further pushed the limits of cost and quality strategies, competing on speedy results in both quality and cost improvement. The advantages of this new strategy are widely recognized to be (1) use of newer technology than that of competitors in a newly developed product; (2) capturing new market niche earlier than that of a competitor; (3) higher customer satisfaction; and (4) better integration of the entire enterprise. In addition, the company can parallelly achieve higher quality, lower cost, and leaner organization (Suri, 1998). To take full advantage of the TBC strategies, new techniques such as quick response manufacturing (Suri, 1998), reconfigurable manufacturing system (Koren et al., 1999; Mehrabi et al., 2000), agile manufacturing and the like have been developed and applied to support the aforementioned shifts in the last decade. Due to rapid changes in recent market demands, reducing product cycle and improving quality is inevitably becoming the prevailing trend. For instance, in the automotive 6 CEGLAREK AND JIN industry, a product life cycle will be shortened to 2–3 years in a few years when compared to the current 4–7 years and 9–12 years from a few years ago. Additionally, market requirements demand significantly shorter new product realization cycles. Currently, it takes …