The BIW Mixed Welding Line Logistics Simulation And Production Sequence Research

Body-in-white (BIW) welding line is the most important process in automobile production, which has a crucial effect on automobile’s production efficiency and quality. But the production logistics process of mixed welding line is very complex, traditional welding line planning and optimizing has a long cycle and poor flexibility. With the rapid development of computer digitized simulation technology, object-oriented modeling system simulation technology emerged at the right moment, which provides an important approach to solve these problems.Firstly, this paper studies the theory and concept of production logistics and BIW mixed welding line, then analyses the specific production logistics process of an automobile manufacture enterprise.Secondly, combining with the analysis above, this paper details the way and procedure of modeling based on Plant Simulation software from four aspects:entity obiect modeling, production flow definition, system parameter settings and logic control settings. Then the simulation model is obtained which closely imitates the actual production logistics situation of welding line.Thirdly, factors that affect the production efficiency of welding line are analyzed with the Design of Experiment (DOE) tool based on the simulation model, the result shows that the failure rate of bottleneck station is the most crucial factor. Then the bottleneck station is optimized through two ways:single buffer optimizing and multiple buffers optimizing, the result shows that adding buffers with proper capacity before bottleneck station and non-bottleneck station can increase the production efficiency of welding line more effectively.Finally, the production sequencing optimizing model is established choosing the minimum makespan as objective function, then the Genetic Algorithms tool is usedto solve the model, which obtains a satisfactory result.This topic derives from the actual enterprise project, which can provide theoretical and technical support for planning and design of automobile enterprise’s BIW mixed welding line.