Proactive Resequencing of the Vehicle Order in Automotive Final Assembly to Minimize Utility Work
Abstract—Mixed model assembly lines are state of the art for mass production in the automotive industry. Over the last decades the production planning and control of those mixed model assembly lines has become more and more challenging due to the continuing trends of mass customization and individualization. The sequencing of the vehicle order is thus an important method to cope with varying processing times and volatile utilization due to these trends. The common vehicle pearl chain limits the potential of sequencing algorithms as the vehicle sequence remains fixed during the complete final assembly. A new approach to minimize utility work in the final assembly is a segmentation of the assembly line into different sections and a proactive rearrangement of the vehicle sequence in a limited manner between two segments. In contrast to existing resequencing methods for final assembly, which focus on restoring disturbed sequences, Proactive Resequencing, as introduced in this paper, is a planned production planning step to create optimal vehicle sequences for different line segments of the final assembly. This innovative concept leads to a new, combined assembly and sequence planning optimization problem, whose purpose is to find a cost-optimal configuration consisting of assembly line segmentations, buffer sizes and types and segment-specific vehicle sequences.
Index Terms—production planning, sequencing, mixed model assembly, minimizing utility workCite: Marius Schumacher, Kai D. Kreiskoether, and Achim Kampker, "Proactive Resequencing of the Vehicle Order in Automotive Final Assembly to Minimize Utility Work," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-5, June 2018. doi: 10.18178/jiii.6.1.1-5