Performance Analysis of a Kitting Process as a Paired Queue

Nowadays, customers request more variation in a company’s product assortment leading to an increased amount of parts moving around on the shop floor. To cope with this tendency, a kitting process can be implemented. Kitting is the operation of collecting the necessary parts for a given end product in a specific container, called a kit, prior to arriving at an assembly unit. As kitting performance is critical to the overall cost and performance of the manufacturing system, this paper analyses a two-part kitting process as a Markovian model. In particular, kitting is studied as a paired queue, thereby accounting for stochastic part arrivals, and kit assembly times. Using sparse matrix techniques, we assess the impact of kitting interruptions, bursty part arrivals and phase-type distributed kit assembly times on the behaviour of the part buffers. Finally, a cost-profit analysis of kitting processes is conducted and an approximation for a two-part kitting process is established.