Process flexibility in lot sizing problems

Author(s)

Gabriel de Souza Amaro

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Limeira, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Ciências Aplicadas
• Defense date: 2021-05-28

Examining board members

Diego Jacinto Fiorotto; Silvio Alexandre de Araújo; Deisemara Ferreira

• Advisor: Washington Alves de Oliveira; Diego Jacinto Fiorotto

Abstract

This work presents a study on process flexibility in production systems. Process flexibility is the ability that a production system has to respond to variations on circumstances, for example, an increase in demand or a reduction in the production capacity. The more flexible a production system is, the better it can respond to the changes. With the research results, two papers (under review) were submitted to international papers and a third paper is in progress. In the first work entitled "Impact analysis of flexibility on the integrated lot sizing problem and supplier selection" we studied the flexibility on the integrated lot sizing and supplier selection problem. The results showed that a reduced amount of selected suppliers producing/delivering a small number of products is enough to obtain the total flexibility benefits. The second paper entitled "Evaluating process flexibility in lot sizing problems: an approach based on multicriteria decision making" used previous results from the literature to analyze the advantages of process flexibility through multicriteria perspectives. The findings showed that although total flexibility is more suitable concerning the total cost, it appeared in the last positions of the alternatives from a based-ranking multicriteria approach. Moreover, the well-known long-chain configuration ranked in the intermediate positions, and it was noticed that it is interesting to invest in process flexibility for all capacity levels. A third work was done to define and analyze flexibility configurations to non-balanced systems (when the number of items is different from the number of machines). We proposed some metrics to study the benefits of flexibility, the main findings showed some configurations with a very reduced amount of links did not use all allowed links. Moreover, even the best designation of items to machines, to increase the amount of flexibility allowed increasing the performance of the configuration. Note that the manuscripts appear attached (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/01145-9 - Analysis of machine flexibility for the lot sizing problem in unbalanced systems
• Grantee: Gabriel de Souza Amaro
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master