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. 2012 CIRP. § This paper was originally submitted to the Special Issue ‘from 44th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems’. (Vol 5. Issue 4, 2012). * Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 231 755 4844; fax: +49 231 755 2649. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Bohnen).