Improvement of earliness and lateness by postponement on an automotive production line

This article takes an interest in improving the performance of a subproblem of car sequencing: the resequencing problem. It extends a model of assembly line with the simulation of buffer stocks with drawers. Presequencing and resequencing are modeled with different types of stock management policy. Furthermore, postponement is introduced by two points of differentiation within the line. After choosing relevant variables and performance indicators a large-scale design of experiments finally enables to estimate average improvement brought by postponement to more than 39.7%, compared to the situation without postponement.