Nested control loops for lean material planning

Within this paper a concept for nested control loops for pull methods for the material planning will be presented. It displays which is one of the first results out of an ongoing German research project with eleven industrial and science partners. Target of the research project is, to develop methods and tools for the planning, evaluation and monitoring of all resources and components of changeable assembly systems. Special emphasis is placed on material provision and production control. The material provision with pull methods like Kanban is lead by the actual workload and usage of parts and is restricted to a barrier of demand. Higher demand pulls the system empty, lower demand results in unused bottom inventory. Therefore pull methods has to be embedded in control loops. They comprises of demand barriers and alerting rules to indicate emerging needs to change the parameters of the production control. An early alert cockpit supports the control loops