ABSTRACT
In the current Industry 4.0 era, simulation, along with approaches for dealing with production activity control, is considered of the utmost importance, for instance, in cyber-physical production systems, but also in any other traditional manufacturing environment. In this context, there are varying kinds of production activity control mechanisms that can be explored, and a wide range of contributions are already available. Despite a broad literature on re-entrant flow shops, it is only recently that studies have highlighted the potential impact of workload control—a preeminent approach to production control—on the performance of these shops. Nowadays, shop performance evaluation is also gaining a refreshed importance in order to further align the requisites imposed by Industry 4.0 with sustainability requirements, and thus it is important to explore not just economic but also social-based measures, and this chapter also provides a contribution in this direction by focusing on more internal performance measures of companies, alongside client-oriented ones.
Moreover, until now, the application of card-based production control systems in these shops, such as the generic Kanban system, has been largely neglected. Therefore, we examine the performance of the generic Kanban system in this context and compare its performance with that of workload control. The study is carried out using discrete event simulation. Results highlight the effectiveness of the generic Kanban system in this context, despite the best performance offered by workload control.
