Whereas Operations Research has always paid much attention to optimization, practitioners judge the robustness of the 'optimum' solution to be of greater importance.Therefore this paper proposes a practical methodology that is a stagewise combination of the following four proven techniques: (1)...

This paper investigates the short-term robustness of production planning and control systems. This robustness is defined here as the systems ability to maintain short-term service probabilities (i.e., the probability that the fill rate remains within a prespecified range), in a variety of...

In this dissertation we address the issues of selecting and configuring pull production control systems for single-product flowlines. We start with a review of pull systems in the literature, yielding a new classification. Then we propose a novel selection procedure based on a generic system...

Traditionally pull production systems are managed through classic control systems such as Kanban, Conwip, or Base stock, but this paper proposes ‘customized’ pull control. Customization means that a given production line is managed through a pull control system that in principle connects...

Short-term performance of a production management system for make-to-stock factories may be quantified through the service rate per shift; long-term performance through the average monthly work in process (WIP). This may yield, for example, that WIP is minimized, while the probability of the...