Design for Synchronized Flow Manufacturing
研究如何通过同步物料流来管理柔性制造系统中的产品组合，以减少制造提前期和在制品等待时间，从而发挥柔性系统的竞争优势。
Firms that build flexibility into their manufacturing system gain a competitive edge from their ability to efficiently produce a mid-variety of products at mid-volumes. In order to realize the competitive edge of flexible systems, manufacturing management has to deal effectively with the greater complexity that flexibility brings about. One of the key factors for the success of a flexible system is the management of the product set flow. If the product flow is poorly managed, products may have long manufacturing lead times, and materials may spend a large amount of time in queues as work in process. In such a situation, most of the competitive potential of the flexible system may be lost. But if the flow of materials through the production/assembly stations is carefully synchronized, with materials moving smoothly and continuously from one operation to the next, then it is possible to attain short manufacturing lead times and little waiting. We refer to this operating condition as synchronized flow. In this paper, we study how to attain a synchronized flow for product sets with different characteristics regarding process flexibility and consistency.