Workload balancing capabilities of load based pull production control systems

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Supply, Production, Logistics, grade: 1,7, University of Groningen (Economics and Business), language: English, abstract: Pull systems can be simple but effective production control systems. However, most pull systems do not perform well with random processing times and have a limited applicability for the MTO sector. The systems do not achieve a decent reduction of total throughput times (TTT) or only under special conditions. The unsolved problem is how to design a load-based system that is able to perform well with random processing times. To overcome this problem a load-based pull system with an adapted release mechanism is proposed. Pull systems need to balance the workload effectively over the different routes and stations in order to reduce TTT. By prioritizing orders regarding their size, the adapted release mechanism balances the workload within the routes and between the different routes. A discrete event simulation with several sets of experiments was conducted to test this release mechanism in a load-based system and compare it to various other pull systems. The results show an improved performance of the proposed system compared to the other systems. The magnitude of this performance improvement strongly depends on the used ratio of large to small orders.