Analysis on multi-stage lot streaming: The effect of transfer

Shortening manufacturing lead time and then gaining time-based competitive advantages are the goals that many more manufacturing companies want to gain. Lot streaming is one of the important methodologies that can be applied by many companies to gain such advantages. In this paper, we focus on the effects of different types of transfer (i.e., preceding-operator-based, successive-operator-based, and non-operator-based) between each pair of stages on the optimal number of transfer batches. With regard to those types of transfer, there are 2 × 4 × 2 problems to be analyzed. To simplify the analysis, we refine the problems to three dominating cases. For each dominating problem, the properties of the objective function (i.e., the makespan) are derived, and the optimal number of transfer batches is determined accordingly. The numerical study illustrates the developed results, and moreover, provides two other important findings.

► We propose and focus on three dominating problems to investigate the effect of transfer on multi-stage lot streaming.
► The optimal solutions and the corresponding solution algorithms to those dominating problems are provided.
► Numerical studies indicate that we can assign a special worker to transport the in-process between stages.
► If assignment of a special worker leads to exorbitant expenditure, we should prefer preceding-operator-based transfer.