Manufacturing in Flow Shop and Assembly Line Structure

Abstract

Product modularity has become an important issue. It allows producing different products through combination of standard components. One of the characteristics of modular products is that they share the same assembly structure for many assembly operations. The special structure of modular products provides challenges and opportunities for operational design of assembly lines. In this paper, an approach for design of assembly lines for modular products is proposed. This approach divides the assembly line into two parts: a subassembly line for basic assembly operations and a production structure for variant assembly operations. The design of the subassembly line for basic operations can be viewed as a single product assembly line balancing problem and be solved by existing line balancing methods. The subassembly line for the variant operations is designed as a flow shop structure and is sequenced with Johnson’s algorithm for 2 machines case and heuristic methods for M machines case. A final result of tasks assigning to the complex production structure is given and a quality of final solutions is discussed. Index