Just-in-Time Production of Large Assemblies Using Project Scheduling Models and Methods

Since the advent of just-in-time driven production planning and control at the Toyota manufacturing plants, the just-in-time paradigm has considered wide-spread consideration within production and operations management (cf., e.g., Schniederjans [

22

] and Cheng and Podolski [

5

]). While it was first employed for the high-volume-production of goods only, later there has been considerable research in the area of low-volume, make-to-order manufacturing (cf., e.g., Baker and Scudder [

2

], Neumann et al. [

18

], and Rachamadugu [

21

]). Agrawal et al. [

1

] considered a practical scheduling problem at Westinghouse ESG, where a number of customer-specific products have to be assembled subject to technological precedence and capacity constraints. The authors developed a MIP-formulation and — in the face of the NP-hardness of the problem — a ‘lead time evaluation and scheduling algorithm’ with acronym LETSA.