ALTERNATIVE REFILLING POLICIES FOR AN ASSEMBLY LINE MANAGED BY KANBANS

Assembly lines managed by means of lean production philosophy are usually characterized by workstations with inline stock areas, supplied by means of items contained in a larger supermarket zone. Furthermore, inline components necessities are usually showed by means of the use of kanbans. In this work, the number of kanbans and the number of carriers serving the line are computed by means of Erlang-C approach, in order to minimize a total cost function obtained as the sum of an estimation of cost of inline stock and of cost of refilling operations. Specifically, the Erlang-C approach is adopted since assures fast re-design of the system when variations in input data occur. Finally, a real-life case study in a company manufacturing items for the automotive market field is presented in order to highlight the approach potentialities when alternative scenarios are studied.