Process flexibility design in unbalanced networks

Abstract

Several design guidelines and flexibility indices have been developed in the literature to inform the design of flexible production networks. In this paper, we propose additional flexibility design guidelines for unbalanced networks, where the numbers of plants and products are not equal, by refining the well-known Chaining Guidelines. We study symmetric networks, where all plants have the same capacity and product demands are independent and identically distributed, and focus mainly on the case where each product is built at two plants. We also briefly discuss cases where (1) each product is built at three plants and (2) some products are built at only one plant. An extensive computational study suggests that our refinements work very well for finding flexible configurations with minimum shortfall in unbalanced networks. © 2013 INFORMS.