A make-to-stock manufacturing system with component commonality: A queuing approach

In this article a manufacturing system that features component commonality and a production allocation mechanism that postpones inventory commitment is modeled. Under this mechanism, which is called the First-Use First-Serve (FUFS), approach, a component is committed to an order only when all other required components become available. Furthermore, production of a component can only occur if its inventory is below a threshold. The performance of the proposed model is compared with the benchmark case of the First-Come First-Served (FCFS) approach under the sequence in which orders are received. The presented results show that FUFS outperforms FCFS on most system performance criteria. However, FCFS may outperform FUFS under some performance measures of dispersion, when the workload is heavy.