Job shop management of products under internal lifespan and external due date

Deteriorating items are found in a wide variety of productive environments and have been extensively reported in the literature. However, the evolution of markets demand the development of new products and new forms of work are made necessary to adapt production systems to those changes. The present work focuses on the production control of perishable products in a job shop environment. Specifically, in those products that have an expiration date within the production interval (internal caducity) that must be delivered before a certain date. As far as we know, there are no previous works that focus on the internal caducity of products at the production-control level. Two systems of different nature have been compared: Workload Control (WLC) and Kanban. WLC is usually a benchmark in job shop and made to order environments. Recent studies show that Kanban, traditionally used in JIT (Just in Time) environments, performs similarly or even better than WLC. The study was performed by discrete events simulation using Python© language, SimPy© and DEAP© modules, and considering several responses of the systems. The results show that both systems have a good performance in a variety of scenarios, with overall performance of Kanban in terms of internal caducity and tardy deliveries.