Selecting a token-based control system using Taguchi methods

Abstract

Token-based control systems have been widely used in manufacturing systems and studied by researchers in the last decades. The most well-known token-based control systems are Kanban and Conwip, although there are others that have been developed recently. Although several comparisons among these systems regarding a number of performance measures have been conducted and described in the relevant literature, they show that no single system can be considered to outperform the others for all manufacturing scenarios. Besides, given the stochastic nature of the manufacturing environments, it is of interest to select a control system based on its robustness with respect to a given criterion or set of criteria. Since Taguchi methods are well-known techniques for the design and selection of different systems according to robustness criteria, in this paper we apply Taguchi methods to select the most robust token-based control system in manufacturing scenarios characterised by rework, different target service levels and non balanced production lines.