Optimal Leadtimes Planning in a Serial Production System

Linguo Gong, Ton de Kok and Jie Ding
Additional contact information
Linguo Gong: Department of Quantitative Business Analysis, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803
Ton de Kok: Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Jie Ding: Department of Management Sciences, Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648

Management Science, 1994, vol. 40, issue 5, 629-632

Abstract: Consider an N stage serial production line where the processing times of orders may be random. Since the carrying costs increase from stage to stage, the standard production procedure, that is, to determine a total leadtime for the entire order by taking an appropriate percentile of the distribution of total processing time and then release the order immediately from stage to stage during the process, may not be optimal since it ignores inventory carrying costs. This article studies a per stage planned leadtime dispatching policy for such systems. The order will not be released immediately to the next workstation prior to a predetermined delivery time, or planned leadtime. The vector of planned leadtimes at workstations is to be determined by trading off expected holding costs at all stages and expected penalty costs for exceeding the total planned leadtime. We show that the optimal vector of planned leadtimes may be obtained efficiently by solving an equivalent serial inventory model of the type considered in Clark and Scarf (1960).

Keywords: serial production system; random processing time; leadtime planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.40.5.629 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:40:y:1994:i:5:p:629-632

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().