Abstract Material flow control in remanufacturing is an important issue the field of disassembly. This paper deals with potential autonomous material release decisions for systems to balance uncertainties related changing bottlenecks, maximise throughput ( $$TH$$ TH ) and minimise work-...

The primary consequence of just-in-time (JIT) production is reduction of inventory. The associated benefit is (a) improved cashflow due to less financial resource tied up in inventory, and (b) less storage space required hence more productive plant area. Coupled with lean production and total quality management (TQM), it may also be possible to (c) improve worker productivity, (d) improve produ...

In just-in-time (JIT) production systems, there is both input stock in the form of parts and output stock in the form of product at each stage. These activities are controlled by production-ordering and withdrawal kanbans. This paper discusses a discrete-time optimal control problem in a multistage JIT-based production and distribution system with stochastic demand and capacity, developed to mi...

This paper discusses a new approach for analyzing queuing models of material control strategies such as kanban, CONWIP and POLCA in manufacturing systems. In practice, these strategies regulate the flow of jobs at various stations of the manufacturing system using a combination of card loops and authorization signals. Queuing models of such systems are composed of closed queuing networks corres...

In practice, a robust solution is more appealing than an optimal solution. The methodology adds risk analysis and bootstrapping. The case study concerns pull production-control systems.Abstract Whereas Operations Research has always paid much attention to optimization, practitioners judge the robustness of the 'optimum' solution to be of greater importance. Therefore this paper proposes a pract...