Experimental analysis of alternative production flow controls for high variety product manufacturing

utilization, inventories or rate of production hold a trade-off dependent on the system design and demand. Quantifying alternative flow control manufacturing systems through simulation allows comparing their performance and its suitability to different production scenarios. From a portfolio of furniture products, their manufacturing processes are determined, and processing times estimated. The operations of the manufacturing cell for wood components of furniture factory are developed by discrete event simulation. The model includes the conditions of a push system and a pull system using Kanban between the work stations. Variation of batch size and product mix demand is also established with a common set of conditions for one-year simulation run. The design of experiments and analysis of variance provides the quantification of the main influence factors on the desired performance indicators. Conclusions and future research opportunities are brought on their overall trends and trade-offs.