On Modeling the Store of an Assembly Shop by Due Date Processes

This paper concerns modeling the store of an assembly shop which is required to collect the components for an assembly and deliver them to the shop floor for fabrication. The production schedule consists of fabricating one assembly per unit time and the deliveries of the components from the vendors need to be timed to this production schedule. We model the arrival streams by due date processes and find the transient and steady state behavior of an assembly queue. We comment on the feasibility of using this modeling methodology for the store of an assembly shop, and show that a problem of determining optimum safety stocks can be solved easily by using this methodology.