Performance Evaluation of a Kitting Process

Nowadays, customers request more variation in a company’s product assortment leading to an increased amount of parts moving around on the shop floor. To cope with this tendency, a kitting process can be implemented. As it gathers the necessary parts into a container prior to assembly, kitting enables a more cost-efficient and qualitative production. However, the performance of this preparation technique in an assembly process has merely been investigated. Therefore, we studied a kitting process with two parts as a continuous-time Markovian queueing model. Using sparse matrix techniques to solve our queueing model, we assessed the impact of kitting interruptions, bursty part arrivals and phase-type distributed kitting times on the behaviour of the part buffers. Consequently, this paper studies part buffer behaviour under realistic assumptions in order to evaluate the performance of kitting operations in a production environment.