Sales Kit Automated Production: An Integrated Procedure for Setup Reduction in Case of High Products Variety

Abstract

Nowadays, the demand for personalized goods is increasing, with small batches of customized products. Companies are asked to cope with this need to be more competitive; thus, it is crucial to optimally set up the production process to cope with the demand. Among the products composed of several parts, sales kits occupy a significant role. Sales kits are sets of different components, supplied as a single unit. Automation is usually used to reduce the unit direct production costs for assembled products, and this is especially true for kitting since it has minimum added value, compared to other technologies. The wide range of components leads to frequent reconfiguration of the feeding devices between different products, increasing the setup time. The aim of this work is to provide a model that minimizes the setup times of automatic kitting systems when working with a high variety of products. To reach this goal, we propose to apply the traveling salesman problem (TSP) to the production process by integrating a multi-clustering model, thus increasing its appeal to several applications. This method is applied both to simulations and to a real case study, and proves to be able to provide a good solution in a reasonable time.

Research on kitting evaluation method of complex electromechanical products

“…By introducing the cost impact of a complete set of materials on the production process, the inherent information processing is directly embedded in the digital production process and parts produced in co-construction, simplifying preparation work in the production process and saving production costs. Bottin et al [10] studied the problem of material configuration of complete sets of products under the market demand of small batch customization, and applied TSP to the production process through the integrated multi-clustering model, so that it can find the optimal sequence through the bill of materials matrix. Faccio et al [11] studied the packaging problem in the production system based on a complete set of materials, constructed a comparison model of the total cost function according to different packaging strategies, and found the optimal complete packaging strategy to provide decision support for operation management.…”