Strategic Inventory Positioning in BOM with Multiple Parents Using ASR Lead Time

Abstract EN

In order to meet the lead time that the customers require, work-in-process inventory (WIPI) is necessary at almost every station in most make-to-order manufacturing.

Depending on the station network configuration and lead time at each station, some of the WIPI do not contribute to reducing the manufacturing lead time of the final product at all.

Therefore, it is important to identify the optimal set of stations to hold WIPI such that the total inventory holding cost is minimized, while the required due date for the final product is met.

The authors have presented a model to determine the optimal position and quantity of WIPI for a given simple bill of material (S-BOM), in which any part in the BOM has only one immediate parent node.

In this paper, we extend the previous study to the general BOM (G-BOM) in which parts in the BOM can have more than one immediate parent and present a new solution procedure using genetic algorithm.