Assembly line balancing problem with quality inspection stations - 副本.doc

Assembly Line Balancing Problem with Quality Inspection Stations Waldemar Grzechca Faculty of Automation Control Electronics and Computer ScienceSilesian University of TechnologyGliwice, Polandwaldemar.grzechca@polsl.pl Abstract—Assembly lines are popular as production layout since more than 100 years. In the 50ies last century researches started to assign tasks to the workstations with assembly line balancing rules. Since that time we can find thousands of journals and conferences papers which deal with the problem of assembly line balancing (ALBP) in different layouts and with different constraints. Author of this paper study a case from Polish factory. The producer recognized that during the manufacturing process occurs a lot of defects in assembly and the number of sold final products fell down. The engineers added 2 quality inspection stations between workstations of the production line. In the paper influence of structure changes on balance are shown. The results are compared with different quality performances (line efficiency, smoothness index, time of the line). At the end final remarks are presented. Index Terms—assembly line balancing problem, heuristic methods, quality indexes. Introduction The manufacturing assembly line was first introduced by Henry Ford in the early 1900,s. It was designed to be an efficient, highly productive way of manufacturing a particular product. The basic assembly line consists of a set of workstations arranged in a linear fashion, with each station connected by a material handling device. The basic movement of material through an assembly line begins with a part being fed into the first station at a predetermined feed rate. A station is considered any point on the assembly line in which a task is performed on the part. Once the part enters a station, a task is then performed on the part, and the part is fed to the next station. The time it takes to complete a task at each operation is known as the process time. The cycle