Approach to Calculating Lateness along Linear and Converging Material Flow Structures

Manufacturing enterprises are currently competing in an environment characterised by shortening product life cycles, an increasing diversity of variants, and an ever-evolving globalisation. The resulting dynamism leads to steadily increasing expectations regarding the logistical performance which have to be met by enterprises in order to remain successful in the market. In this context, schedule reliability is of crucial importance. At the same time, diversity and complexity of value-added processes obscure the interdependency of logistical objectives and the possibilities of influencing them. This is where logistical models help to still describe the correlations. Such a logistical model is developed in this paper. It contributes to calculate the lateness distribution and, thus, the schedule reliability along linear and converging material flows.