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 job shop structure and is sequenced by priority heuristic methods. A final result of tasks assigning to the complex production structure is given and a quality of final solutions is discussed.
Index Terms—Assembly lines, heuristic methods, job shop structure, estimation of final results.
Waldemar Grzechca is with the Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, ul. Akademicka 2A, Poland (e-mail: waldemar.grzechca@polsl.pl).
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Cite:W. Grzechca, "Complex Production Structures in Assembly Processes," International Journal of Materials, Mechanics and Manufacturing vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 150-154, 2014.
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