Leveling of low volume and high mix production based on a Group Technology approach

Application of conventional leveling approaches in industry is constrained by the requested product diversity. Therefore, leveling is predominantly used in high volume production. However, it can be utilized in low volume and high mix production by means of an adapted leveling approach presented in this paper. This approach primarily uses clustering techniques to group product types into families. After that, a family-based leveling pattern is generated. The paper focuses on the formation of product families for leveling and describes in detail the usage of a so-called desirability index for cluster validation. It also provides an example of actual application.