Optimization of Waiting Times Between Stations in Unbalanced Production Lines

Abstract

Today's companies have adopted the concept of mass production to increase capacity and efficiency in production lines. Mass production lines have undergone many developments in the process until today. These changes also caused some problems to arise. The location of the stations on the production line, unbalanced work distribution and waiting times reduce the efficiency of the production. There are many studies on these efficiency problems in the literature and most of these studies are about finding solutions to line balancing problems. This novel study is aimed to reduce the amount of energy used by optimizing waiting times between stations on a production line with unbalanced work distribution. An objective function has been designed to determine current and force values, acceleration, and dead time of the linear carrier. Objective function has been solved via a non-linear optimization method. As a result of the optimization, the dead time between cycle times of the stations is minimized to prevent waiting time in the production line. As a result of the study, the energy-saving rate was calculated as 31.79%. It is envisaged that this study will be used as a cost-reducing factor in production lines containing similar conveying systems. In this respect, it has the potential to contribute to industrial applications.