Examining Rebalancing Considers of the Mixed-Model Assembly Line Type-II for the Straight and U-shaped Layout Using the Taguchi Method

Abstract

Facing the increasingly competitive market environment, assembly lines are gained attention because of the assembly process expenditure consumes more than 20 % of the manufacturing cost, and also improve its products to meet demand. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop worker-task assigned to workstation heuristic (W-TAWH) approach for solving mixed-model assembly line balancing problem (M-MALBP), in which the assembly tasks have to be assigned to workstations, and each workstation needs to select only one of the available operators to perform the assigned tasks corresponding to the straight and U-shaped assembly lines with the objective minimum cycle time. The performance of the developed approach was evaluated and validated through applying the practical case in the Dayla State Company for Electrical Industries (DSCEI) particularly in the electric transformer factory (ETF). Taguchi method was used to evaluate the contribution of each one of the considerations in the assembly line are solution approach, layout, sequence vector (SV), and workstation numbers. All results proved the stated considerations have impact significant in any trying to re-balance the assembly line.

Keywords

• assembly line
• consecutive heuristic algorithm
• recursive heuristic algorithm
• cycle time