Production control policies for a multistage serial system under MTO-MTS production environment

A manufacturing system composed by several stages in serial system is considered. Each stage can produce several types of products from a semi-finished product. At each stage, a production control strategy is performed to release MTO and MTS orders. The MTS orders try to reduce the lead times and increase the service level for the customers. This research proposes MTS control policies observing the customer demand with higher service level reducing the stock level of the buffers at each stage. A simulation environment based on multi-domain methodology has been developed to test the proposed approach compared to policies proposed in literature. The numerical results are obtained for different levels of customer demand, fluctuations of the product type requested, and the reliability of the production system. The main results show how the proposed approach leads to better results both for service level and reduce the MTS level in all conditions tested.