Performance comparison of multiple product kanban control systems

Kanban control systems have been around for decades and have been used to control work-in-process of manufacturing systems. Lately many variations of the basic control system have been developed; however, much of the work in the development and comparison of control systems has focused on a single-stage manufacturing system producing a single product type. In this research, we present procedures for optimising multiple product kanban control systems, namely Base Stock, Traditional Kanban Control System and Extended Kanban Control System (both dedicated and shared type). We then conduct a detailed simulation study to compare the performance of the systems using a common total cost measure. Numerical results show that the dedicated and shared-extended kanban control systems outperform the other two systems. The study also shows that in spite of their different schematics and contrary to conventional wisdom, the performance of dedicated and shared-extended kanban control systems doesn’t differ much.