Alena Puchkova, research associate in the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, presented a paper called "Balancing push and pull strategies within the production system" at the 7th IFAC Conference on Management and Control of Production and Logistics (MCPL 2016) in Bremen, Germany, February 22-24.

The paper presents an approach for achieving a trade-off between pull and push production control principles. A mathematical model of the operation of a production system is suggested, which incorporates different options for inventory control strategies. The model covers several types of disruptions: resource breakdown, product quality loss and demand fluctuation. The optimal solution minimizes the total cost objective function and can be push, one of the classic pull control systems (kanbans, conwip, basestock) or any possible combination/superimposition of them. The approach was applied to study an industrial strength laboratory system. In this paper optimal pull/push combination of the system is presented and its evaluation is shown under several scenarios with disruptions.

The work is based on the research carried out by Julien Le Romancer who was supervised by Alena Puchkova during his final ISMM project in 2015. This project is part of the Distal project funded by Boeing.

For further information contact Alena Puchkova, ap823@cam.ac.uk.

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