Overview of Lean Manufacturing under Uncertainty

This article presents a literature review on the application of lean manufacturing (LM) techniques under a context of uncertainty. Forty articles have been identified, reviewed and classified according to the following criteria: keywords, application context, modeling approach, LM techniques/tools, type of LM waste, type of uncertainty, and software tool. This classification emphasizes the types of uncertainty inherent in lean production planning processes and the modeling approaches for optimization. The selection of the articles has been based on those scientific journals containing a higher representation of papers within this context. The main findings of this literature review point to the use of three main lean manufacturing tools; the most used modeling approach, which is interpretive structural modeling; and the main uncertainty studied, which is demand. From the results of this study, it was found that research and experimentation in LM applications under an uncertainty context only represents 10% of the selected articles, making it an underresearched topic that requires future research efforts.