Inventory Management in Multi-product Lean Manufacturing Environments: Analysis of Hybrid Policies

The aim of this project is to analyse and compare the performances of inventory management policies in multi-product lean manufacturing environments. The creation of hybrid Kanban ? CONWIP models is extremely popular in the field of operations research. This project undertakes the analysis of newly created BK-CONWIP D-KAP and BK-CONWIP S-KAP models against the HK-CONWIP model and tests the influence of the decoupling of demand signals and production authorization. The analysis of the models is done through both the built in algorithm of ExtendSim 8 and a multi-objective genetic algorithm. In order to ensure accuracy of the results, the performance of these algorithms is compared along with sensitivity analysis of the multi-objective genetic algorithm. The project also contains an ethics section on production simulation.