scholarly journals Automated Fist Assembly Line Design

Author(s):  
Zhang Xiao

Abstract In many industries, assembly lines are automated to reduce production cost. Utilizing industrial robots which are superior to humans in repetitive and dangerous operations. This paper presents an automated and flexible FIST assembly line concept which consists of layout of plant, timing and options for each action. ‘L’ shaped connected stations states in which sequence the closure products are being assembled. It is through line balancing that optimal number of stations, cycle time and efficiencies are approved. Besides, financial analysis, to which ROI, TBO and TCO are critically correlated, are elaborated accordingly as well.

Author(s):  
Konstantinos N. Genikomsakis ◽  
◽  
Vassilios D. Tourassis

Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) aims at optimally assigning the work elements required to assemble a product to an ordered sequence of workstations, while satisfying precedence constraints. Notwithstanding the advances and developments in ALB over the years, recent and thorough surveys on this field reveal that only a small percentage of companies employ ALB procedures to configure their assembly lines. This paradox may be attributed, to some extent, to the fact that ALB is addressed mostly under ideal conditions. Despite the time variability inherent in manufacturing tasks, there is a strong research trend towards designing and implementing algorithms that consider ALB on a deterministic basis and focus on the optimality of the proposed task assignments according to existing ALB performance measures. In this paper, the need to assess the performance of the proposed solutions of various algorithms in the literature is corroborated through simulation experiments on a benchmark ALB problem under more realistic conditions. A novel ALB index, namely the Effective Cycle Time, ECT, is proposed to assess the quality of alternative assembly line configurations in paced assembly lines operating under task times variations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binghai Zhou ◽  
Qiong Wu

PurposeThe balancing of robotic weld assembly lines has a significant influence on achievable production efficiency. This paper aims to investigate the most suitable way to assign both assembly tasks and type of robots to every workstation, and present an optimal method of robotic weld assembly line balancing (ALB) problems with the additional concern of changeover times. An industrial case of a robotic weld assembly line problem is investigated with an objective of minimizing cycle time of workstations.Design/methodology/approachThis research proposes an optimal method for balancing robotic weld assembly lines. To solve the problem, a low bound of cycle time of workstations is built, and on account of the non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard nature of ALB problem (ALBP), a genetic algorithm (GA) with the mechanism of simulated annealing (SA), as well as self-adaption procedure, was proposed to overcome the inferior capability of GA in aspect of local search.FindingsTheory analysis and simulation experiments on an industrial case of a car body welding assembly line are conducted in this paper. Satisfactory results show that the performance of GA is enhanced owing to the mechanism of SA, and the proposed method can efficiently solve the real-world size case of robotic weld ALBPs with changeover times.Research limitations/implicationsThe additional consideration of tool changing has very realistic significance in manufacturing. Furthermore, this research work could be modified and applied to other ALBPs, such as worker ALBPs considering tool-changeover times.Originality/valueFor the first time in the robotic weld ALBPs, the fixtures’ (tools’) changeover times are considered. Furthermore, a mathematical model with an objective function of minimizing cycle time of workstations was developed. To solve the proposed problem, a GA with the mechanism of SA was put forth to overcome the inferior capability of GA in the aspect of local search.


2021 ◽  
Vol 158 (A2) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Ozkok ◽  
M K Kasikci ◽  
I H Helvacioglu

Recently, the competitive environment is very tough in shipbuilding industry and under these circumstances, manufacturing a ship in a shorter time becomes significantly important in order to meet the customer demands. Therefore, it is hard to do that by using traditional manufacturing techniques. The shipyards located in Turkey usually have functional locations for the machines and this situation often causes longer production times. Instead of this, assembly lines should be redesigned as workshops in the shipyard. Prefabrication work unit is a good example in which an assembly line is needed to be designed. In this study, an assembly line design for prefabrication work unit was performed. For this, assignments of work operations to work shops were carried out by using Largest Set Rule Algorithm and some alternatives were created according to compare the different values of cycle time. These alternatives were simulated by using a production simulation program and the most appropriate assembly line design was presented.


2015 ◽  
Vol 789-790 ◽  
pp. 1240-1244
Author(s):  
Peeyapach Jitchaiyaphum ◽  
Suksan Prombanpong

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a productivity improvement through waste reduction and line balancing. One of the obstacles of a manual assembly line nowadays is an awkward line design with over manpower, a lot of wastes, and low balance efficiency. As a result, the production line may not satisfy customer demand and ends up with low production line efficiency. This is due to the fact that this type of production line is operated by human and the customer demand or requirements are frequently fluctuated. Human workers are prone to make mistakes, inefficient, and unorganized. Thus, the major causes of production line down time are discussed with suggestion of remedy actions to improve the productivity. In addition, calculation of line balancing is demonstrated. One of the actual manual assembly lines will be used as a case study. It is found that after improvement line balance efficiency is increased from 46.49 to 86.66 percent with the productivity improvement of 159 percent.


Author(s):  
Konstantinos N. Genikomsakis ◽  
◽  
Vassilios D. Tourassis

The process of optimally assigning the timed tasks required to assemble a product to an ordered sequence of workstations is known as the Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) problem. Typical approaches to ALB assume a strict mathematical posture and mostly treat it as a combinatorial optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the idle time across the workstations, while satisfying precedence constraints. The actual nature of the tasks assigned is seldom taken into consideration. While this approach may yield satisfactory cycle time results on paper, it often leads to inconvenient task assignments in an actual work environment. It has been postulated in the literature that assigning groups of related tasks to the same workstation may lead to assembly lines that exhibit increased robustness in real-world situations at the expense of a slightly increased cycle time. The prototypical example of such an approach, Agrawal’s Largest Set Rule (LSR), utilizes backward work relatedness to assign a set of cohesive tasks to the proper workstation. In this paper, we enhance the performance of the original LSR algorithm through the concept of bi-directional work relatedness, where backward and forward relationships are taken into consideration for task assignments. The proposed concept leads to comparable cycle time and improved work relatedness. Applying this novel concept to a benchmark ALB problem demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach.


2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (12) ◽  
pp. 3345-3358 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Eswaramoorthi ◽  
G.R. Kathiresan ◽  
T.J. Jayasudhan ◽  
P.S.S. Prasad ◽  
P.V. Mohanram

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 113-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Sivasankaran ◽  
P. Shahabudeen

Balancing assembly line in a mass production system plays a vital role to improve the productivity of a manufacturing system. In this paper, a single model assembly line balancing problem (SMALBP) is considered. The objective of this problem is to group the tasks in the assembly network into a minimum number of workstations for a given cycle time such that the balancing efficiency is maximized. This problem comes under combinatorial category. So, it is essential to develop efficient heuristic to find the near optimal solution of the problem in less time. In this paper, an attempt has been made to design four different genetic algorithm (GA)-based heuristics, and analyze them to select the best amongst them. The analysis has been carried out using a complete factorial experiment with three factors, viz. problem size, cycle time, and algorithm, and the results are reported.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 119-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmut Kayar ◽  
Öykü Ceren Bulur

This study primarily includes theoretical information on the performance and lost productive time of a firm. Furthermore t-shirt sewing operations of a garment firm were analysed and time measurement for each operation was carried out by the time keeping method. By considering the measurements obtained, different performance estimations, the firm’s lost productive time rates, and the standard time was calculated within 5 different scenarios. According to each sewing standard time obtained, the assembly line balancing practice was carried out using the Hoffman method. Later on results of the assembly line balancing were compared, and the importance of employee performance assessment and its lost productive time rates for firms were discussed. The aim of the study was to emphasize the value of impeccable determination of the employee performance assessment and lost productive time rates. Consequently garment firms will be more cautious in calculating the standard time and will be able to reach their production target within the accurate measurement they obtain.


2015 ◽  
Vol 799-800 ◽  
pp. 1398-1402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jongrak Niamsawan ◽  
Suksan Prombanpong

This research objective is to improve the productivity of cookware assembly line by means of time and distance reductions. The motion study and line balancing techniques were applied to the entire assembly operations. A bottle neck was identified to where the operation with inadequate machine layout and workplace organization, including the unbalanced workloads. The new workplace layout and new working method for operators were designed and implemented as well as balancing the assembly line. Specifically, the conveyor speed and duration between the consecutive workpieces in the production line were adjusted to 0.10 m/s and 50 cm, respectively. The number of operators needed in the process can be reduced from 14 persons to 11 persons. The cycle time for assembling process is decreased from 12 to 5 second.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document