Smoothing and Batching

Mixed-model production systems are widely adopted by manufacturing companies in a broad range of industries where customers demand a variety of models of the same product, Monden [22], Sawik [149], and Boysen et al. [150]. Automotive and electronics industries are two well-known examples with well-established presence of different options that create a tremendous variety of models of a single product. At the same time the demand for a particular model is often insufficient to warrant dedicated production resources for the model, instead the resources have to be shared by a whole collection of models. Thus, operating such mixed-model manufacturing systems efficiently is a challenging problem that has been widely studied in the operations management literature particularly with the goal to reduce their inherent variability.