Decentralized reactive Kanban system

For multi-stage production and transportation system with unstable changes in product demand, this paper proposes a decentralized reactive Kanban system. In the proposed system, the time series data of the demand from the succeeding stage are monitored at each stage individually, and unstable changes in the demand are detected by utilizing control charts. For the detected unstable changes, the buffer size for each stage is controlled as a reaction to the changes. In order to develop the control rule of the buffer size in the proposed system, the multi-stage production and transportation system considered is decomposed into single-stage processing systems, and the performance of the decomposed system is investigated by the simulation experiments under various stable-demand conditions. Based on the results, a decentralized reactive Kanban system is proposed. The performance of the proposed system is investigated by simulation experiments under various unstable product demand conditions, and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed system.