An analytical method for performance evaluation of kanban controlled production systems

The aim of this paper is to develop a general purpose analytical method for performance evaluation of multistage kanban controlled production systems. We consider a single-part type production system decomposed into stages in series. Each stage consists of a manufacturing cell and an output buffer. With each stage is associated a given number of kanbans. The kanban controlled production system is modeled as a queueing network with synchronization mechanisms. The basic principle of the proposed approximation method is to decompose the original kanban system into a set of subsystems, each subsystem being associated with a particular stage. Each subsystem is analyzed in isolation using a product-form approximation technique. An iterative procedure is then used to determine the unknown parameters of each subsystem. Numerical results show that the method is fairly accurate.