Planning and Multi-Objective Optimization of Production Systems by means of Assembly Line Balancing.

The ever-shorter time to market demanded by customers and an increasing number of variants lead to high-frequency product development and production system planning cycles. This article therefore presents an approach that aims at increasing efficiency in the repetitive planning of variant-specific assembly systems. Compared to the state-of-the-art manual, document-based planning prevailing in industry, formal optimization methods have the potential of considering multiple optimization criteria. This article therefore proposes an approach for assigning individual process steps to stations for a given customer cycle time while minimizing the number of stations as well as optimizing additional criteria such as increasing the production system flexibility, achieving good ergonomics or reducing the deviation within provided tolerances. The solution space of the optimization is constrained by the mathematical modeling of a limited number of stations. The operations research (OR) model developed for this purpose considers given assembly precedence graphs as an input and includes variables, parameters, objective function and constraints. Especially the latter considers the process precedence relations in terms of the Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) problem as well as a divisibility of process steps. The approach is applied to the variant-specific planning of a highly automated welding assembly in the automotive supplier industry as use case. The results show its applicability and potential in reducing planning time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]