Determination of the number of containers, production kanbans and withdrawal kanbans; and scheduling in kanban flowshops - Part 2

We consider the problem of determination of the number of containers or container size, production kanbans and withdrawal kanbans, and scheduling of containers in presence of material handling between workstations, and dual blocking mechanisms operative on both workstations and material handling. A heuristic is proposed to address the problem of determining the number of containers, and production and withdrawal kanbans, and also determining the sequence of containers to minimize the sum of weighted flowtime, weighted earliness and weighted tardiness of containers. Recursive equations, developed in part 1 of this paper, are used for time-tabling of the sequence of containers. An extensive performance evaluation of the heuristic and a benchmark procedure, based on random search, has been carried out by generating a number of problems of various sizes.