Process Flexibility Design in Unbalanced Networks

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Deng, Tianhu; Shen, Zuo-Jun Max
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.1120.0390
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 24-32
• 关键词: process flexibility design; unbalanced networks; Chaining Guidelines

摘要

Several design guidelines and flexibility indices have been developed in the literature to inform the design of flexible,production networks. In this paper, we propose additional flexibility design guidelines for unbalanced networks, where the numbers of plants and products are not equal, by refining the well-known Chaining Guidelines. We study symmetric networks, where all plants have the same capacity and product demands are independent and identically distributed, and focus mainly on the case where each product is built at two plants. We also briefly discuss cases where (1) each product is built at three plants and (2) some products are built at only one plant. An extensive computational study suggests that our refinements work very well for finding flexible configurations with minimum shortfall in unbalanced networks.