Kanban devs modelling, simulation and verification

Kanban Control Systems (KCS) have become a widely accepted form of inventory and production control. The creation of realistic Discrete Events Simulation (DES) models of KCS require specification of both information and material flow. There are several commercially available simulation packages that are able to model these systems although the use of an application specific modelling language provides means for rapid model development. A new Kanban specific simulation language as well as a high-speed execution engine is verified in this paper through the simulation of a single stage single part type production line. A single stage single part KCS is modelled with exhaustive enumeration of the decision variables of container sizes and number of Kanbans. Several performance measures were used; 95% Confidence Interval (CI) of container Flow Time (FT), mean line throughput as well as the Coefficient of Variance (CV) of FT and Cycle Time were used to determine the robustness of the control system.