A threshold-based control policy for scrap reduction of perishable in-process inventories

Sustainability has become a key factor for competitiveness. Sustainable production strategies aim at the scrap reduction of in- process inventory. In some sectors such as food or pharmaceutical sector, in-process inventories must be scrapped after a certain time due to perishability. Therefore, local policies are usually applied to machines in order to mitigate the impact of disruptive events leading to scrap. This work presents an analytical model for the performance evaluation of two-machine lines which integrates a threshold-based control policy for the scrap reduction grounding on the joint system dynamics. Results show that the proposed integrated policy performs better than local policies with respect to the scrap reduction without major losses in throughput. Moreover, it is shown how considerations about operating control policies can be beneficially included in the system configuration phase.