Moving Assembly Line Research Articles

Digitisation of a moving assembly operation using multiple depth imaging sensors

Several manufacturing operations continue to be manual even in today’s highly automated industry because the complexity of such operations makes them heavily reliant on human skills, intellect and experience. This work aims to aid the automation of one such operation, the wheel loading operation on the trim and final moving assembly line in automotive production. It proposes a new method that uses multiple low-cost depth imaging sensors, commonly used in gaming, to acquire and digitise key shopfloor data associated with the operation, such as motion characteristics of the vehicle body on the moving conveyor line and the angular positions of alignment features of the parts to be assembled, in order to inform an intelligent automation solution. Experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed method across various assembly conditions, and the results are validated against an industry standard method using laser tracking. Some disadvantages of the method are discussed, and suggestions for improvements are suggested. The proposed method has the potential to be adopted to enable the automation of a wide range of moving assembly operations in multiple sectors of the manufacturing industry.

New Perspectives on Capacity Utilization: From Moving Assembly Lines to Computer-Based Control Systems

This paper investigates how our understanding of capacity utilization has changed over the last two centuries. By reviewing contemporary and historical literature, it argues that two perspectives on capacity utilization developed during this period — a "traditional" and a "modern" perspective. It finds that the "traditional" perspective was prevalent up until WWI and focused on mass production and managerial control as means to maintain a high level of capacity utilization, while the "modern" perception took form after WWI and could be described partially as reaction to and partially as an extension of the traditional perspective. The paper argues that the modern perspective made the concept of capacity utilization more relevant and useful — by demonstrating how it could be applied to other sectors of the economy than manufacturing and how computer-based technologies rather than managerial control could be used to improve capacity utilization.

‘All they lose is the scream’: Foucault, Ford and mass production

Henry Ford insisted that his development of mass production owed nothing to Taylorism. But Ford and Taylor can only be understood as part of a wider revolution in American management that prioritized efficiency, experimentation and flow. Following Foucault, Henry Ford represented the rationalizing capability of ‘sovereign power’. Ford's radical innovations in production techniques depended upon parallel innovations in administration and accounting. The development of the moving assembly line in Highland Park depended upon an assemblage of organizational innovations, not just the practical experiments of Ford engineers. In 1921 Ford's complex knowledge base was brutally dismantled in Ford's giant new River Rouge plant. Incremental productivity gains were now squeezed from the line by supervisory pressure. The Ford experience suggests the interweaving of ‘sovereign’ and ‘disciplinary’ forms of power/knowledge.

Spinning Welfare: The Gains from Process Innovation in Cotton and Car Production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell phones. In each case the implicit or explicit assumption is that researchers were measuring the value of a new good to society. In this paper we use the same techniques to find the value to society of making existing goods cheaper. Henry Ford did not invent the car, and the inventors of mechanized cotton spinning in the industrial revolution invented no new product. But both made existing products dramatically cheaper, bringing them into the reach of many more consumers. That in turn has potentially large welfare effects. We find that the consumer surplus of Henry Ford’s production line was around 2% by 1923, 15 years after Ford began to implement the moving assembly line, while the mechanization of cotton spinning was worth around 6% by 1820, 34 years after its initial invention. Both are large: of the same order of magnitude as consumer expenditure on these items, and as large or larger than the value of the internet to consumers. On the social savings measure traditionally used by economic historians, these process innovations were worth 15% and 18% respectively, making them more important than railroads. Our results remind us that process innovations can be at least as important for welfare and productivity as the invention of new products.

Work Variations and Musculoskeletal Stresses in Paced Production Operations

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that variations in assembly jobs increase workers’ exposure to risk factors for musculoskeletal disorders. Variations can be caused by different factors such as, materials, material placement, product variety, work flow, etc., and they can require the worker to perform movements not considered in the calculation of the allocated time. Work variations may require workers to work faster and longer to keep up with paced work, which may increase repetition and reduce recovery time. On a moving line, workers may have to reach further to keep up with the work, which requires additional time and results in posture stress. An observational study was conducted in a moving assembly line where food trays were prepared for patients at a large hospital to test the proposed hypothesis. Frequency and quantity of work variations, and the frequency of reaching outside of the reach envelope and recovery time were compared. The variety of materials (along with their location), interar...

Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (review)

Reviewed by: Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. By Nicole Boivin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+269. $85. In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin invites readers to rethink fundamental relationships between people and material culture. With indifference to disciplinary boundaries, her highly original synthesis shows how the material world “plays and has long played a fundamental role in shaping human thought, society and, over the long term, evolution” (p. 225). A post-processualist archaeologist trained at Cambridge University, Boivin became adept at treating material culture as a symbolic medium. Her specialty, however, is geoarchaeology, the study of soils. Through immersion in this science-heavy specialty and repeated visits to Balathal, a village in India, she came gradually to appreciate that symbolic interpretation leaves out what is material about soils—and material culture generally. This problem, she believes, is endemic in the soft side of the academy, and I agree. To most social scientists and humanists, our material life is relatively invisible. She attributes this to the deeply rooted idealism of Western intellectual culture, which has passed down from Plato the dogma that material things are mere projections of concepts and ideas. Material culture, if treated at all, is regarded as a symbolic system like language, whose underlying grammar or code can be teased out. Consequently, scholars need not confront the diverse physical interactions that take place between people and things, and most ignore artifacts altogether. Citing Joseph Corn’s analysis of articles published in Technology and Culture (which appeared in a 1996 volume edited by W. D. Kingery, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies), Boivin highlights the irony that even historians of technology seldom deal with actual objects. Boivin aims to restore materiality to material culture, arguing the likelihood [End Page 677] that the “material world . . . evoke[s] experiences that lie beyond the verbal, beyond the conceptual, and beyond even the conscious . . . [artifacts] do not necessarily symbolise anything else: their very power may lie in the fact that they are part of the realm of the sensual, of experience, and of emotion, rather than a world of concepts, codes, and meaning” (pp. 8–9). The emotive performance of material culture has an affinity with David Nye’s notion of “technological sublime,” the ability of grandiose constructions to inspire a sense of wonder, but Boivin insists that any artifact—whether religious icon or clay pot—can have emotive effects. More general still is her insistence that people, depending on their past experiences, may be engaged by artifacts in any sensory mode, from touch to taste. Clearly, the sensuous engagement of people with things—the very materiality of human life—eludes idealist conceptions. Even so, as behavioral archaeologists have demonstrated, a materialist perspective does not preclude a concern with symbolic meanings. Boivin argues that material culture also exercises agency—i.e., plays a causal role—in human affairs. To take the poignant example satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we note that factory workers’ interactions are caused by the arrival of particular parts on a moving assembly line. Exploring wider implications of artifact agency while questioning social constructivism, Boivin elaborates Langdon Winner’s concept of autonomous technology, which underscores the potential of technologies to reshape society. (She does of course reject simplistic technological determinism.) Applying niche-construction theory from biology, Boivin shows how changes in material culture also affect human biological evolution. Humans create, through material culture, the niches to which they adapt as biological beings. She rehearses the textbook case of how dependence on dairy farming caused genetic change in humans. (Prior to the advent of dairy farming, adults did not drink milk and the production of lactase, needed for digesting milk sugar, diminished greatly. In societies that became dependent on dairy farming, however, adults continued to drink milk, which eventually led to genetic changes that prolonged the production of lactase.) Also, Boivin maintains, our big brain with its extraordinary executive functions evolved under the selective pressures created by tool use. Boivin believes, and I agree...

The all-steel body as a cornerstone to the foundations of the mass production car industry

This article provides a novel account of the development of the mass production car industry. The usual primacy given to Henry Ford, the moving assembly line and the organisation of labour is counter-balanced by a focus on production technology. Using historical sources, emphasis is placed on the all-steel body technology pioneered by Edward Budd, whose importance to modern mass car production has only become evident in the light of later, post-Ford developments in the automotive industry. The diffusion of this technology is shown to have transformed the economic structure of the US car industry, providing the structural template for contemporary car manufacturing around the world.

Resequencing and feature assignment on an automated assembly line

We consider the problem of resequencing a prearranged set of jobs on a moving assembly line with the objective of minimizing changeover costs. A changeover cost is incurred whenever two consecutive jobs do not share the same feature. Features are assigned from a set of job-specific feasible features. Resequencing is limited by the availability of offline buffers. The problem is motivated by a vehicle resequencing and painting problem at a major U.S. automotive manufacturer. We develop a model for solving the joint resequencing and feature assignment problem and an efficient solution procedure for simultaneously determining optimal feature assignments and vehicle sequences. We show that our solution approach is amenable to implementation in environments where a solution must be obtained within tight time constraints. We also show that the effect of offline buffers is of the diminishing kind with most of the benefits achieved with very few buffers. This means that limited resequencing flexibility is generally sufficient. Furthermore, we show that the value of resequencing is sensitive to the feature density matrix, with resequencing having a significant impact on cost only when density is in the middle range.

Determining responsibility for development of the moving assembly line

The development of the moving automobile final assembly line was a major milestone in manufacturing. The techniques required to make it work are demanding, but the resulting increase in productivity is phenomenal. Consequently, and not surprisingly, some people have claimed a major role in its development. The initial date for this innovation is either July 1908, or August 1913 and credit is given to Henry Ford, Charles Sorensen, Clarence Avery, or W.C. Klann, depending on whom one reads. This paper tries to clarify what happened on these dates and who was responsible. Investigation reveals that each of these men did play a role in development of the moving automobile assembly line.

A Human Factor Framework for Analysis of an Assembly Work

Manual assembly work can be classified in terms of degrees of freedom. In car manufacturing “bounded work” means work at the moving assembly line. “Free work” is arranged in separate work stations for teams working with functional modules. The human factor characteristics of the different work types can be described by a three factor framework: Activation. Predictability and Freedom of Action. These three key factors are based on well-established and heavily researched theories. By analysing each, and their interdependence, with the different job assignments we have got a new qualitative description based on quantitative data. These data can be used for the balancing of process-oriented work rotation, work enlargement and work enrichment. With the use of this methodology a design of work tasks can be made that is both good for the individual worker and results in maximum utilisation of the total resources.

Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America by Terry Smith

642 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE reshaping our vision. It opens the way to future studies that will, perhaps, provide the note of passionate urgency—and suggestions for social policy remediation and change—that the subject so definitely deserves. Jui.ie Wosk Dr. Wosk is professor of humanities at State University of New York, Maritime College. She writes about both 19th- and 20th-century art and technology, and her book Breaking Frame (Rutgers University Press, 1992) explores artists’ images of the industrial age. Making the Modem: Industry, Art, and Design in America. By Terry Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. xv+512; illustrations, notes, index. $50.00. At one time the concepts of modernity and modernization were the preserve of social scientists who used them to chart the progress (or lack thereof) of developing nations toward the Western standard of eco­ nomic and political life. Today the concept of modernity has become substantially relativized, historicized, and generalized, and it is largely accepted that “Modernism” was a vibrant and internally contradictory movement, but one that has receded into history. Making the Modem, a vast and ambitious study by art historian Terry Smith, is the latest contribution to the ongoing debate over the character of modernity. Confining his analysis to the United States, Smith argues that the visual imagery of modernity emerged in the 1920s and 1930s and was more or less securely in place by the beginning of the Second World War. The new iconological “regime” was the product of a shifting but mutually reinforcing series of alliances among the industrial technolo­ gies of mass production, corporate industry, various New Deal federal agencies, art-and-documentary photography, painting, and design. The social setting of this interlocking process is the shift from entrepreneur­ ial to monopolistic capitalism, and its markers are the prevailing depictions of industry and workers, cities and crowds, and products and consumers. The overall effect of this confluence of tendencies is that “modernity circa 1930 was taking form in domains of representation devoted above all to aestheticizing American industry” (p. 425). The body of the book consists of richly detailed case studies of the emergence of a newly “modern” way of seeing, beginning with the visual symbolism of the Ford Motor Company empire and ending with the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40. Part 1 consists of a compelling examination of the modernization of work in Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant, 1910-29. Smith shows how the moving assembly line promoted a new way of framing space, abetted by the industrialfunctional architecture of Albert Kahn and the documentation of the factory system by painter-photographer Charles Sheeler. TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 643 The separate chapters of part 2 study the role of periodicals such as Time, Life, and Fortune in the drive toward a modern business imagery conceived along Fordist lines, the resistance to this program manifest in the epic murals of Diego Rivera and the private retablos of Frida Kahlo, and the work of Social Realist photographers such as Lewis Hine and Roy Stryker, enlisted by the Farm Securities Administration and other agencies to publicize the New Deal vision ofAmerica’s past and future. Together, whether wittingly or not, they created an aesthetic that served to bring into harmony the contending elements of modernity. Part 3, finally, extends the argument to the commercialism of the nascent industrial design profession, the purist modernism endorsed by the Museum ofModernArt, and the futurism projected by the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Although full of shrewd judgments and arresting insights, the author’s discussion of “the priority of the visual” in design relies excessively on a small number ofdated sources, with the result that this section is the least persuasive in the book. Although written with the perspectives and priorities of an art historian, Smith’s overall argument rests on premises that are directly pertinent to the history of technology. In its leaps from the gravity-fed conveyor belt to the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, from Harley Earl’s idea of “dynamic obsolescence” to Alfred Barr’s struggle for custodianship of the standards of Modern Art, Making the Modem demonstrates that in structural ways, “modernity in...

The Myth of the Line: Ford's Production of the Model T at Highland Park, 1909–16

This article questions the myth that the moving assembly line was Ford's key productive innovation before 1918. It begins by analysing Hounshell and Lewchuk's recent historiographic accounts of Ford. The article then refutes the myth of the line by demonstrating that the myth cannot be reconciled with Ford Archive evidence on the chronology of productivity growth and the composition of costs. A concluding section sets the moving assembly line in historical perspective by reinterpreting Ford's achievement as the realisation of flow in repetitive manufacturing.

Abandoning the moving assembly line: Models of human operators and job sequencing : Buzacott, J.A.Int J Production Res, 1990, 28.5, 821–839, 10 refs

Abandoning the moving assembly line: Models of human operators and job sequencing : Buzacott, J.A.Int J Production Res, 1990, 28.5, 821–839, 10 refs

Abandoning the moving assembly line: models of human operators and job sequencing

SUMMARY Models are developed which 'explain' why new automobile assembly systems are abandoning traditional moving assembly line concepts if human operators perform most of the tasks. The new systems incorporate parallel stations, asynchronous work flow and small inventories. However, the paralleling creates problems in synchronizing parts delivery, and models are developed to illustrate these problems and the effect of alternative part delivery systems and the impact of job resequencing requirements.

Engines of Struggle: Technology, Skill, and Unionization at General Motors, 1930-1940

None of the histories describing the organization of work or workers at General Motors seriously addresses the role of technology as a non-neutral force, as something developed and implemented by those with the power to choose who clearly recognized its potential use in the realities of day to day struggle between groups with opposing interests. Far from neutral, technology at GM in the Great Depression was used as an instrument of class struggle. It was also used to oppose potential government intervention threatened by New Deal labor policies. This struggle?the use of technology to preserve and strengthen managerial prerogative against a union movement fomented by government policy?is the subject of this essay.1 The background of the economic and social uses of technology in the automobile industry can be traced to the introduction of the moving assembly line at Ford Motor Company in 1913. The line effectively transferred control over the production process from skilled, semi-autonomous craftsmen to the company's front offices. From there management not only set the speed of the line but also defined and standardized the physical movement of production and assembly, thereby standardizing the pace, intensity, and work space of individuals on the line. During the 1920s, this transfer of skill, changes in plant layout, and the routinization of work were important aspects of a second industrial revolution. De-skilling through mechanical improvement, scientific management, and liberal wages all