Dynamic Synchronized MMAL And Inventory Policy

Since the first assembly line was established by Ford in 1913, this kind ofproduction system has been widely applied in most manufacturing areas. Theimprovement of assembly line balancing has a great impact on the productioncapability and competence capability for enterprises;hence it has been set as theacademic focus for times. Many models and algorithms were proposed therefore.Because of low automation level, many enterprises rely on manual assembly. Andnormally, the production department, the inventory department and other functionaldepartments plan their schedules separately. In terms of these circumstances, amulti-timeslot dynamic synchronized assembly line balancing and inventory modelwas proposed in this article, in which the in-flow work pieces were pusheddownstream at the same time with the advancement of timeslots. Besides, traditionalsingle-patch optimization was extended to multi-patch ones.The simulated annealing algorithm, namely a heuristic algorithm, was select to solvethe problem. At first, by ranked positional weight, earliest due date and dynamicprogramming, the initial assignment and sequence as well as the correspondinginventory policy were achieved individually, which formed the initial strategy aftercombined together. The strategy could be optimized after repeated iteration. Thenumerical example showed the cost could be optimized over 10%, which cost lessthan 10 minutes (CPU: Pentium IV 2.4GHz;DDR: 512MB). Visual simulation wasrealized by Delphi platform.When applied to a real case of a merchant vehicle company, the mixed-model couldbe simplified into a simple series-model. The cost could be lowed over 28% afteroptimization, compared to the current strategy. Should the line layout be improved,the cost could be reduced again by 15%.Both of the above cases showed its feasibility and good performance, hence it couldbe provided as a reference for real production and inventory schedules.