Designing an assembly process with stochastic material arrivals

Due to product proliferation and quick changes in manufacturing materials sourcing partnerships, assembly process in the electronic assembly industry is frequently altered or new processes are introduced. The most appropriate assembly process is critical for companies to maintain an effective supply chain. We study the problem of how to design an assembly process that relies on the stochastic arrival times of parts and components such that the probability of on-time delivery of finished products is maximized. We first provide some analytical results for cases that are polynomially solvable and then provide a branch and bound algorithm for deriving an optimal solution to the problem. We also provide heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. Finally, computational experiments show that our heuristic algorithms perform very well.