Flexible Assembly Line Optimal Design To Minimize Cost

Flexible assembly line design problem is belonged to facility planning research area. It includes many optimization problems of different aspects, such as equipment selection, task assignment, facility layout, operation strategy, etc. This thesis focuses on equipment selection and task assignment problems in the environment of simple flexible assembly line and flexible assembly line with parallel stations.This thesis studies on the energy consumption cost accounting of equipment operation. An accounting method based on the time-driven activity based costing is proposed in this thesis.The flexible assembly line design problem considering the workstation number and cycle time constrains is studied in this thesis. An optimal design mathematical model was proposed to minimize the total cost. A lower bound is given to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm. A new method combining penalty function method and genetic algorithm is designed to solve the model. Computational experiments are conducted and it is shown that the method is efficient, and can be used to solve problems of different sizes.The flexible assembly line with parallel stations and unfixed workstation number design problem is also studied in this thesis. An optimal design mathematical model is proposed and a greedy algorithm is designed to minimize the cost. A parallel weight parameter is introduced to build the mathematical model. Computational experiments are conducted to study the effect of parallel weight parameter.