A comparison of alternative kanban control mechanisms. II. Experimental results

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Abstract
This paper continues our study of the design of inventory control policies for serial systems. Using simulation, we compare alternate control policies where a target of mean throughput has to be met under three different objectives - minimize the maximum inventory, minimize the average inventory and minimize the variance of the output - for balanced lines and lines with one bottleneck, The main objectives of this paper are: (1) to study several objectives not amenable to sample path analysis and (2) to show some sets of conditions and objectives under which Constant-Work-in Progress (CONWIP) is preferred over the traditional kanban mechanism, and vice-versa.