Local WIP control and hybrid CONWIP–Kanban mechanisms

Develop hybrid production control mechanisms that combine CONWIP for global control of the total WIP entering the manufacturing system with Kanban for local control of WIP distribution among conveyor loops.

Background

The investigated system uses a fixed global CONWIP level and employs job sequencing and routing to influence workload distribution across conveyor loops. The paper does not establish a dedicated local WIP-control mechanism for regulating the distribution of jobs among those loops. The authors identify this as a future research direction involving a hybrid arrangement in which CONWIP controls total system entry while Kanban controls loop-level WIP.

References

Future research will investigate the local WIP control among the loops. In particular, hybrid production control mechanisms will be studied by combining CONWIP and Kanban strategies to separately manage the overall WIP entering the system (global approach) and the WIP distribution between loops (local approach).

— Dynamic production control and deadlock prevention in conveyor equipped manufacturing systems  (2609.29461 - Castiglione et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Concluding Remarks, Section \ref{sec:conclusion}