Balancing Push and Pull Strategies within the Production System

This paper presents an approach for achieving a trade-off between pull and push production control principles. A mathematical model of the operation of a production system is suggested, which incorporates different options for inventory control strategies. The model covers several types of disruptions: resource breakdown, product quality loss and demand fluctuation. The optimal solution minimizes the total cost objective function and can be push, one of the classic pull control systems (kanbans, conwip, basestock) or any possible combination/superimposition of them. The approach is illustrated in an example, for which optimal pull/push combination is found and its evolution is shown under several scenarios with disruptions.