Abstract
Manufacturing firms are facing the challenge of minimizing variety-induced complexity in assembly systems. One of the effective approaches to complexity management is to reconfigure the assembly system by rearranging its assembly sequence. In order to rearrange an assembly sequence, a design-oriented approach is necessary because assembly is an activity of connecting parts through an interface between them. It means that the assembly sequence in production is restricted by the structure of interface connections in design. In this vein, this paper introduces a new design-oriented approach called interface design approach to complexity management in assembly systems. First, the mechanism of how the structure of interface connections affects assembly system complexity is identified. Then, an interface design framework is proposed for effectively finding an optimal interface structure and its assembly sequence to minimize assembly system complexity. For evaluating the complexity, the operator choice complexity index is adopted and modified for the interface design problem. In the case study, the framework is applied to the interface design problem by using industrial data of a plasma display panel (PDP) family from LG Electronics. The result of the study demonstrates that the assembly system complexity is significantly reduced by the proposed interface design framework.
Highlights
Manufacturing firms have been launching a variety of products to the market in order to meet diverse needs of customers
This paper focuses on product interfaces by showing the mechanism of how interface design affects assembly system complexity
As shown in the table, we identified that the assembly system complexity is minimized to 99.50 in scenario 4, which allows both the development of a new interface structure and the reconfiguration of an assembly sequence
Summary
Manufacturing firms have been launching a variety of products to the market in order to meet diverse needs of customers. The trend of diversifying products is accelerating to target global markets and to achieve higher market share. For this reason, manufacturing firms construct mixed-model assembly lines to efficiently produce a variety of products. Previous studies have demonstrated the situation in which high product variety causes poor performance of an assembly system through empirical observations and simulation [3]– [4]. At this point, manufacturing firms are facing the challenge of minimizing variety-induced complexity in assembly systems while maintaining a variety of products
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