Abstract:

Returnable Transport Items （RTI） are widely used in the automobile manufacturing industry. The management of RTI plays an important role in the normal operation of the automobile parts production logistics system. Once the management of RTI is not good， such as the return of empty RTI is not timely， it may lead to the interruption of the production line and cause great economic losses. Therefore， the matching between orders and empty RTIs， the selection of parts and the return process of RTIs are considered， a semi-closed queuing network is conotructed， two indexes of order queue length and RTI utilization rate are selected to measure the influence of RTI quantity and return lead time on the balance of the system. And the AMVA algorithm is used to solve the problem. In this paper， the actual data of enterprises are used to carry out experiments. The results show that the number of RTI and the return lead time have a great influence on the system balance. Different storage policies also affect the results. The data results of sorted storage policies are better than those of random storage. Through this model， the specific RTI number and return lead time of the optimal solution can be obtained. This makes the external order of the system almost need not wait for pickup， and the utilization rate of RTI can be close to 100%， avoiding the waste of resources. Finally， the balance of parts logistics system is improved. The main contribution of this paper is to consider the influence of RTI on the balance of the system， and obtain the index of the stability of the direct reaction system through the queuing network， so as to ensure the smooth logistics operation and ensure the normal operation of the production line.

Key words: returnable transport items, auto parts logistics, logistics balance, storage policy, queuing network