Scheduling of flexible flow lines in an automobile assembly plant

The hybrid flow shop scheduling problem

“…The authors consider family setup times and study several dispatching rules. [5] studied a complex HFS problem arising in car manufacturing where different performance criteria were studied.…”

Lagrangian relaxation approach to minimize makespan for hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with unrelated parallel machines

“…Constraint set (2) ensures that each job must be assigned to one machine at each stage. Constraint set (3) indicates that completion time of job j in the first stage is greater than or equal to its processing time in this stage.…”

Henry Ford vs. assembly line balancing

“…The limited literature on the PALBP (Gökçen, Kürşad and Benzer, 2006;Scholl and Boysen, 2009;Ozbakir, Baykasoglu, Gorkemli and Gorkemli, 2011) only mentions flexibility in terms of product variety and facilitating maintenance. Agnetis, et al (1997) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y forced on a company when its sales fell below expectations and its line needed to adapt when output fell or demand grew. Flexibility was not then an initial design objective but a reaction to operational and marketing needs.…”

“…In the ALB literature the processes are more limited, usually with a strictly linear flow with no set-ups required and no (or little, within "mixed model" formulations) product variation. Nevertheless, Agnetis, et al (1997) describe using flexible flow lines in automobile assembly whereby Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) relaxed the strict flow between stages in the line: that is, an item finishing processing in the first stage could then be moved to any idle processor in the next stage; and then from that processor to the next subsequent processor that was free. So these flow F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y lines were not strictly linear sequences of processors as usually defined as "lines".…”

“…By thus decoupling the stages the capacity of each could be better managed to meet production requirements. Agnetis, et al (1997) varied the production rates from 1100 up to 1800 units per day and showed that increasing the numbers of AGVs generally, and the number of processors at each stage would allow efficient production. They note (Agnetis, et al 1997, 362) This matching of capacity to demand can be seen in Oliver Evans's (1834) fully mechanized flour mill from 1785.…”