Performance evaluation of a kitting process

Abstract

Nowadays, customers request more variation in a company's product assortment leading to an increased amount of parts moving around on the shop floor. To cope with this tendency, a kitting process can be implemented. As it gathers the necessary parts into a container prior to assembly, kitting enables a more cost-efficient and qualitative production. However, the performance of this preparation technique in an assembly process has merely been investigated. Therefore, we study a kitting process with two parts as a continuous-time Markovian queueing model. Using sparse matrix techniques to solve this model, we assess the impact of kitting interruptions, bursty part arrivals and the kitting time distribution on the behaviour of the part buffers. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.