Cost-Minimal Selection of Material Supply Strategies in Matrix Production Systems

Abstract

AbstractCompanies are facing changing market demands, high variance, and volatile quantities. Resilient production systems are needed to meet these challenges. The matrix production is such a system. It offers degrees of freedom in terms of operation sequence flexibility and work distribution flexibility through redundantly used resources. For the material supply this is a challenge in planning. The material must be supplied in a cost-efficient manner and without shortages.To increase planning quality, a method for selecting the least expensive material supply strategy is developed. Depending on consumption, constraints of space, and supply framework conditions, different strategies are advantageous for each material. The developed method requires three steps.First, required data for step 2 and step 3 is collected. In step 2, standardized process blocks combine to describe a company-specific material supply strategy. The approach is company-independent and added by cost functions to the process blocks. Through the cost functions applied to the process blocks the costs of a supply strategy is achieved. As material can be supplied in alternative ways, multiple expected costs for supplying arise. As only one supply strategy needs to be selected, step 3 is necessary. It uses the branch-and-cut algorithm on the mathematical description of the logistic selection problem to find the cost-minimal configuration of supply strategies. As the problem is in the context of matrix production, several conditions and requirements need to be included in the selection process.The result is the assignment of a material supply strategy to each material while minimizing the costs.