Components Management Policies In Assembly To Order Environments

In modern assembly to order systems, components and sub-assemblies warehouse locations and dimensions are critical decisional variables since they can provide high flexibility level to assembly activities, reducing both handling and holding costs. The structural diversity between assembly parts concerning the components consumption, transportation and storing can largely influence the stoking policies [16]. The problem gets more complex if the correct physical location areas for common assembly parts must be chosen [12, 21]. The study in hand concerns components warehouse centralization/decentralization choices. The theoretical model proposed in this study involves multiple assembly lines destinations, with known locations and consumption rates for a given assembly part. The problem is to determine the number of decentralized supermarkets and their optimal locations in order to well service different assembly lines in a JIT environment. Specifically, the paper applies an innovative step by step decision-making procedure to support the decision-making of materials management policies: the model proposed considers materials morphological diversity, load unit transportation costs, load unit inventory costs, space availability for warehouses and supermarkets and the commonality degree between products families.