Sequence Scrambling in Aggregated Mixed-Model Production Line Modeling

Global competition and volatile customer demands for individual products lead to shortened product life and innovation cycles and rising numbers of product variants. By manufacturing on mixed-model lines (MML), companies can meet these challenges and produce many variants on one line. To run MML, more frequent planning is required. During early-stage planning, production system constraints, such as buffers and internal supply relationships, must be dimensioned. Therefore, methods like discrete-event simulation can be applied. However, line-modeling parameters are unknown in early-stage planning. Consequently, detailed simulation models cannot be built. For this reason, aggregated modeling approaches are applied. But existing aggregated modeling approaches do not consider MML. Therefore, this paper advances the existing modeling approaches to consider MML and integrates inline variant scrambling effects. This enables the dimensioning of decoupling buffers, as they are necessary to rebuild production sequences. The proposed approach was implemented and applied using an exemplary case study.