The Kanban assignment problem – a non-integral approach

Most production control systems have one thing in common: they are based on a quantity which is naturally considered to be an integer. As a result of this, all approaches up to now have correspondingly assumed that the actual quantity to be used in the manufacturing environment will be integral. This is equally true of the Kanban production control systems, Conwip systems and buffered production lines. In this work, we first discuss how to simulate the use of a non-integral number of cards in the production system. We then look at how one can predict the performance of such a system. We test our approach and show that it makes sense and that our estimates are useful. Finally we show that using our methodology we can use existing models in a more natural way to obtain results which are more economical and previously considered infeasible.