2012 Volume 6 Issue 7 Pages 1057-1070
To meet higher customer satisfaction and shorter production lead time under rapidly changing demands and global competition, importance of just-in-time and agile manufacturing is raising much more attentions than before. To cope with such circumstances, assembly line is shifting to mixed-model assembly line. Under such situation, it is essential to extend system boundary wider and resolve the problem totally. Moreover, in this study, we pay our attention to the latest production manner applied in car industry and extend our conventional model associated with due dates of finished products. Finally, we have formulated a bi-objective optimization problem that aims at reducing total sum of tardiness and total volume of inventories at the same time. Besides the usual one-through approach to solve the resulting problem, we adopt a two stage approach associated with multi-objective analysis. To reveal some properties of the proposed approaches, we provide a case study and discuss effectiveness of the method and usefulness of the results.
