Design of assembly systems for modular products

Author

He, David W. ; Kusiak, Andrew

Author_Institution

Dept. of Ind. Eng., Iowa Univ., Iowa City, IA, USA

Volume

13

Issue

5

fYear

1997

fDate

10/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

646

Lastpage

655

Abstract

To respond to the challenge of agile manufacturing, companies are striving to provide a large variety of products at a low cost. Product modularity allows production of different products by combining standard components. One of the characteristics of modular products is that they share the same assembly operations for a part of their structure. The special structure of modular products provides challenges and opportunities for the design of assembly systems. Given a family of modular products, designing low cost assembly systems is an important problem. In this paper, an approach for the design of assembly systems for modular products is proposed. The assembly system is decomposed into two subsystems based on the structure of modular products. The configuration problem of the assembly system is formulated and solved by a tabu search based algorithm

Keywords

assembling; computational complexity; directed graphs; production control; search problems; agile manufacturing; assembly operations; assembly systems; configuration problem; modular products; product modularity; standard components; tabu search based algorithm; Agile manufacturing; Assembly systems; Automotive engineering; Costs; Design engineering; Helium; Heuristic algorithms; Manufacturing industries; Manufacturing systems; Product design;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1042-296X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/70.631226

Filename

631226