Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014

Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; When investigating different location and/or system designs the possible variables to take into consideration can differs between the alternatives. Different production system will have different optimal working conditions and hence should be compared with parameters suitable for the actual production system. When planning production and calculating production costs the batch size is of high interest. Based on a manufacturing part cost model, this paper will present a new model, close connected to the production system, integrating production performance, set-up times, material costs, material handling costs and tied capital, giving the production economic optimal batch size. The aim is to give companies a model for determining the economic optimal batch size in order to use this knowledge to make strategic decisions regarding production planning. Mathematical simulations are performed to analyse the differences in result from the developed model and Wilson's existing standard method for calculating the economic order quantity, hence to verify the importance of making an in-depth analysis, taking the production system into consideration. The advantage of the developed model is the usage of production costs based on variable batch sizes, giving a more accurate outcom