Efficency Improvement In Diesel Engine Maintenance And Assembly

With the development of the railway in China, locomotive maintenance isbecoming more professional, more centralized with larger scale and larger production toenhance the productivity. However, due to the lack of scientific research and planningon-site facilities and processes, the core components of the diesel engine assembly isexposed to several problems: operation activities are not well designed and organized;parts not correctly placed; workload of each station is unbalanced; and someworkstations were bottleneck of the whole maintenance line. These problems do notonly cause unnecessary loss of working hours, but also cause backlog of semi-finishedproducts. In severe cases the whole assembly line has to stop. The assembly andmaintenance line is very difficult to meet the overall demand under its current situation.In order to solve those problems, we conducted a survey to investigate the currentstatus for diesel engine assembly and maintenance in a locomotive maintenanceworkshop. We used scientific management theories, time study to determine and tooptimize the content and standards of the time of the diesel engine assembly processes.We measured and fixed operating standards, proposed a new facility layout, andadjusted the number of stations and their work assignment. Through on-siteimplementation, we made the production capacity of the whole assembly line from0.99piece to rise to2.85pieces per day, and improved the assembly line balancing rate from69.9%to96.9%, and reduced the assembly line smoothness index from346.17to14.65.The improvement of the productivity in the diesel engine maintenance line fulfilled therequirement of the increasing demand on engine maintenance.