A new methodological support for control and optimization of manufacturing systems in the context of product customization

ABSTRACT

Manufacturers more and more need to customize their products to respond to customer demand and differentiate from competitors. The present paper deals with key questions related to the implementation of production control systems in a high product mix and/or high routing mix environment generated by product customization. ConWip (CONstant Work In Progress) provides a sustainable, effective and adaptive production control system. The objective of the paper is to help manufacturers to optimize their production control system in product customization manufacturing environments. Four models that generate different generic routings are presented and tested with a sample of data from an industrial case. These routings are implemented into Wipsim, an engineering tool, which allows the optimized parameters for each routing to be calculated. Our experiments show that our models generated worthwhile generic routings and help manufacturers choose among them, depending on their own products customization specific context.

KEYWORDS:

• Production Control System
• conwip
• heuristics
• generic routing
• MILP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anicia Jaegler

Yann Jaegler received a diploma in engineering from the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, Saint- Etienne, France and Ph.D. degree a from ENSAM-Mines Paris Tech. He is working in the manufacturing sector.

Anicia Jaegler is full professor at Kedge Business School. She received a diploma in engineering, a Ph.D. degree from the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, Saint- Etienne, France, and an HDR (post-doctoral diploma) from the CRETLOG, University Aix-Marseille, Marseille, France. She was second at the Global Women Supply Chain Leaders Awards 2020 in the category Supply Chain Academic Excellence. Since 2018, she has been Director of the Operations and Information Systems Management Department. Since 2021, she is associate dean for inclusivity. Her current research focuses on manufacturing and sustainable supply chain management applied to different sectors such as luxury goods or food processing.

Fatima Zahra Mhada is a professor at The University Mohamed V – Rabat/ENSIAS in Morocco. She holds a PhD from Polytechnic Montreal (2011) and an engineering degree from “l’École Mohammedia d’Ingénieurs”. His research area is related to modeling, simulation and stochastic control applied to the various components of the supply chain. She ensures the course of the simulation, supply chain management, and Information Systems design and implementation within the ENSIAS. She has published the results of his research in renowned international journals (Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Economics, Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, Computers in Industry, …) and co-organized four editions of the International IEEE Conference Management operational Logistics.

Damien Trentesaux is full professor at the LAMIH UMR CNRS 8201 research lab of the Université Polytechique Hauts-de-France (France). His areas of interest concern the control and the optimization of discrete event systems and their interaction with the human in the context of Industry 4.0. He is head of the SurferLab (AI in transportation), a joint research lab funded by Bombardier Transport, Prosyst and UPHF. He also works with IRT Railenium and SNCF on the autonomous train and is currently involved in the project “droit des robots et autres avatars de l’humain” funded by the IDEX Université de Strasbourg. He is author and coauthor of more than 180 peer-reviewed publications in journals, books, and chapters of books and conference proceedings. He is a member of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Technical Committee on Industrial Agents and the IFAC Technical Committee 5.1 on Manufacturing Plant Control.

Patrick Burlat graduated in 1986 with an engineering degree from Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Supelec) in France. He earned a master degree in management from University of Paris La Sorbonne in 1990, a PhD in economics from University of Lyon in 1996, and a Habilitation for thesis supervision in 2002. After working for five years as production engineer at Schlumberger Industries, he joined the Ecole des Mines de Saint Etienne in 1992 as a full professor and then head of department. His research interests lie in the development of decision support systems and diagnostic tools to improve performance. He created the startup Wipsim (Work In Process SIMulation) in 2015 to developp and distribute new algorithms for optimizing manufacturing workshops. He is currently the CEO of this startup.