Queuing Models for Multi-Product Pull Type Inventory Systems

Competitive pressures are forcing manufacturing companies to find new ways to provide a wide variety of products at reduced costs. Pull type material control strategies that make efficient use of available production capacities and optimize inventories could be very useful in improving factory operations. However, there is aneed for analytical tools that precisely model the operating characteristics of multi-product pull systems. Such models should not only provide reasonably accurate performance estimates butalso be amenable to rapid analysis of performance tradeoffs. This book presents an analytical approach to solve multi-product systems with pull type material control strategies. A state of the art queuing theory based approach to solve analytical models for multi-product pull systems is being discussed. A parametric decomposition based approach is used to analyze multi-product pull systems under different settings such as batch size constraints, multi-stage production, finite demand and raw material. The approach presented in this book has been found to be reasonably accurate even in realistic settings.