Assembly Line Balancing Under Demand Uncertainty

Assembly lines are productive systems, which are very efficient for homogeneous products. In the automotive industry, an assembly line is used in the production of several vehicle variants, including numerous configurations, options, and add-ins. As a result, assembly lines must be at the same time specialized to provide high efficiency, but also flexible to allow the mass customization of the vehicles. In this book, the planning of assembly lines for uncertain demand is tackled and optimization algorithms are offered for the balancing of such lines. Building an assembly line is a commitment of several months or even years, it is understandable that the demand will fluctuate during the lifetime of an assembly line. New products are developed, others are removed from the market, and the decision of the final customer plays a role on the immediate demand. Therefore, the variation and uncertainty of the demand must be accounted for in an assembly line. In this book, methods dealing with random demand or random production sequence are presented, so that the practitioners can plan more robust and efficient production systems. About the author Celso Gustavo Stall Sikora is an industrial engineer and was a research assistant at the Institute for Operations Research at the University of Hamburg where he received his PhD in 2021. His work focus on optimization procedures for the design and operation of automotive production systems.

This book introduces several mathematical models in assembly line balancing based on stochastic programming and develops exact and heuristic methods to solve them. An assembly line system is a manufacturing process in which parts are added in sequence from workstation to workstation until the final assembly is produced. In an assembly line balancing problem, tasks belonging to different product models are allocated to workstations according to their processing times and precedence relationships among tasks. It incorporates two features, uncertain task times, and demand volatility, separately and simultaneously, into the conventional assembly line balancing model. A real-life case study related to the mask production during the COVID-19 pandemic is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed framework and methodology. The book is intended for graduate students who are interested in combinatorial optimizations in manufacturing with uncertain input.

Assembly lines are productive systems, which are very efficient for homogeneous products. In the automotive industry, an assembly line is used in the production of several vehicle variants, including numerous configurations, options, and add-ins. As a result, assembly lines must be at the same time specialized to provide high efficiency, but also flexible to allow the mass customization of the vehicles. In this book, the planning of assembly lines for uncertain demand is tackled and optimization algorithms are offered for the balancing of such lines. Building an assembly line is a commitment of several months or even years, it is understandable that the demand will fluctuate during the lifetime of an assembly line. New products are developed, others are removed from the market, and the decision of the final customer plays a role on the immediate demand. Therefore, the variation and uncertainty of the demand must be accounted for in an assembly line. In this book, methods dealing with random demand or random production sequence are presented, so that the practitioners can plan more robust and efficient production systems.

Assembly lines are productive systems, which are very efficient for homogeneous products. In the automotive industry, an assembly line is used in the production of several vehicle variants, including numerous configurations, options, and add-ins. As a result, assembly lines must be at the same time specialized to provide high efficiency, but also flexible to allow the mass customization of the vehicles. In this book, the planning of assembly lines for uncertain demand is tackled and optimization algorithms are offered for the balancing of such lines. Building an assembly line is a commitment of several months or even years, it is understandable that the demand will fluctuate during the lifetime of an assembly line. New products are developed, others are removed from the market, and the decision of the final customer plays a role on the immediate demand. Therefore, the variation and uncertainty of the demand must be accounted for in an assembly line. In this book, methods dealing with random demand or random production sequence are presented, so that the practitioners can plan more robust and efficient production systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2021, held in Saint-Étienne, and virtually in November 2021. The 70 papers (15 full and 55 short) presented with 5 industrial workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of major challenges and recent advances in various domains related to the digital transformation and collaborative networks and their applications with a strong focus on the following areas related to the main theme of the conference: sustainable collaborative networks; sustainability via digitalization; analysis and assessment of business ecosystems; human factors in collaboration 4.0; maintenance and life-cycle management; policies and new digital services; safety and collaboration management; simulation and optimization; complex collaborative systems and ontologies; value co-creation in digitally enabled ecosystems; digitalization strategy in collaborative enterprises’ networks; pathways and tools for DIHs; socio-technical perspectives on smart product-service systems; knowledge transfer and accelerated innovation in FoF; interoperability of IoT and CPS for industrial CNs; sentient immersive response network; digital tools and applications for collaborative healthcare; collaborative networks and open innovation in education 4.0; collaborative learning networks with industry and academia; and industrial workshop.

This book discusses the latest advances in the broadly defined field of advanced manufacturing and process control. It reports on cutting-edge strategies for sustainable production and product life cycle management, and on a variety of people-centered issues in the design, operation and management of manufacturing systems and processes. Further, it presents digital modeling systems and additive manufacturing technologies, including advanced applications for different purposes, and discusses in detail the implementation of and challenges imposed by 3D printing technologies. Based on three AHFE 2020 Conferences (the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conference on Human Aspects of Advanced Manufacturing, the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conference on Advanced Production Management and Process Control and the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conference on Additive Manufacturing, Modeling Systems and 3D Prototyping, the book merges ergonomics research, design applications, and up-to-date analyses of various engineering processes. It brings together experimental studies, theoretical methods and best practices, highlights future trends and suggests directions for further technological developments and the improved integration of technologies and humans in the manufacturing industry.

Third edition of International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Optimization and as a premium fruit, this book, pursue to gather research leaders, experts and scientists on Intelligent Computing and Optimization to share knowledge, experience and current research achievements. Conference and book provide a unique opportunity for the global community to interact and share novel research results, explorations and innovations among colleagues and friends. This book is published by SPRINGER, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Ca. 100 authors submitted full papers to ICO’2020. That global representation demonstrates the growing interest of the research community here. The book covers innovative and creative research on sustainability, smart cities, meta-heuristics optimization, cyber-security, block chain, big data analytics, IoTs, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, Industry 4.0, modeling and simulation. We editors thank all authors and reviewers for their important service. Best high-quality papers have been selected by the International PC for our premium series with SPRINGER.