Multi-resource balancing: a case of a German kitchen manufacturer

We address a multi-resource balancing-problem at Nobilia-Werke J. Stickling GmbH % Co. KG, the leading kitchen manufacturer in Germany. Nobilia maintains no warehouse for finished goods. The customised cabinets of a kitchen are manufactured in parallel and aggregated just in sequence for loading into trucks immediately after production. A smooth flow of materials is essential to ensure on-time completion and loading of a whole kitchen. Nowadays, changing customer tastes drive customisation. Due to an increasing number of capacity restrictions in its production processes, Nobilia's current planning method has reached its limits. We present an integer programming model to address a variant of the multi-resource generalised assignment problem (MRGAP). We consider a multi-criteria objective function and a set of constraints reflecting Nobilia's requirements. We propose a software-based solution approach for Nobilia's instance sizes. The results of our computational experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our approach provides significant benefits.