Adapting just-in-time manufacturing systems to preventive maintenance interruptions

The just-in-time (JIT) system is designed to operate in an ideal environment such as with constant processing times, smooth and stable demand and uninterrupted processing. However, in a real-life environment, the JIT system is subjected to various uncertain factors including stochastic processing times, variable demand and process interruption due to planned preventive maintenance. These factors seriously compromise the performance of JIT. In this paper, we present a newly developed JIT system which uses an algorithm to dynamically and systematically manipulate the number of Kanbans in order to offset the blocking and starvation caused by the said factors during a production cycle. We refer to the new system as the flexible Kanban system (FKS). We provide steps of the algorithm and demonstrate the effectiveness of FKS using a case example. For the case example, we present the solution procedure, results and discussion.