Research On Buffer Design And Resequence In Automobile Production Line

Buffer plays an important role in flow shop. It can not only provide room for work-in-process (WIP), but also resequence the WIP to meet the requirement of production. The buffer is especially important under the mass customization production environment. In order to find a more effective way for production operation and WIP management, the buffer design problem and the WIP resequence problem in automobile production process are studied in this thesis.The capacity and structure design of buffer in automobile production line are primarily discussed in the thesis. The function model between the availability of production line and the capacity of buffer is constructed in order to confirm the capacity of the buffer according to the required availability. For the structure design of buffer, the appropriate structure is selected according to the demand of resequence capability by classifying several different conventional structures into three ranks according to their resequence capability.The resequence is to change and refresh the sequence of products in production lines with buffer. The bodies in the buffer before painting station in paint shop can be resequence in order to reduce the change of colors when the bodies are being painted. A method named"Complicated rules and Branch and bound method"is proposed to solve the problem. The second resequence problem about selecting WIP from Painted-Body-Storage (PBS) in assembly shop is studied based on an annular buffer by Genetic Algorithm (GA) considering the time consumption of resequence and characteristic of the sequence obtained by resequence. For each problem above, example is given to verify the effectiveness of the algorithms.Finally, the algorithms for resequence of WIP with buffer mentioned above are implemented in the Manufacturing Execute System (MES) for automobile production. The application of MES in Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co-operation indicates that the algorithms may greatly reduce the impact of artificial subjective factor in resequence, thus enhance the automaticity of production management and the productivity.