On the search of workstations arrangement in pull production systems

This research presents a model to determine the workstation arrangement and kanban number for pull production systems. Several practical production line characters are considered, and evolutionary algorithms are utilized to obtain the optimal/near-optimal result. The proposed system is a flow-shop, pull production line with N unreliable workstations and N − 1 inter-stage buffers. Workstations may be allocated to any stage in the production line and have a different processing rate at each stage. Workstations will breakdown/recover at fixed rates, and the operating-breakdown-recovery process is formulated as a Markov process in this model. The size of the inter-stage buffers varies according to the arrangements of workstations. A model is established on the objective of minimizing the total production cost per item of the finished product. The costs considered in the system contain the allocation of workstations, operations, inventory, and production shortage costs. An evolutionary algorithm, genetic algorithm, is used to obtain the allocation of workstations in the production line.