Design of bi-criteria kanban system using simulated annealing technique

In the kanban system, the main decision parameters are the number of kanbans and lot size. In this paper, an attempt has been made to set the number of kanbans at each station and the lot size required to achieve the best performance using simulated annealing technique. A simulation model with a single-card system has been designed and used for analysis. A bicriterion objective function comprising of mean throughput rate and aggregate average kanban queue has been used for evaluation. Different perturbation schemes have been experimented and compared.