Abstract
As the customer's needs for diverse colors, the process of bus painting shop is becoming more and more complex. In particular, frequent changes of paint colors in each spray process require the cleaning of the painting nozzles and setting them up for the new paints, which results in increased time and cost and reduced production. This also increases environmental influences. This paper proposes, as a solution to this issue, the use of color selection field (CSF). CSF is physically a system of conveyors that are used to rearrange objects in a flow line. CSF is proposed, in this paper, to be introduced right before the spray process so that buses are better grouped according to their desired colors. Various parameters of the CSF, such as the number of conveyors and algorithms to determine the rearranged sequence of buses, have been determined by running simulations using the digital manufacturing technology, and investigating the simulation results. As an outcome of the proposed solution, the CSF system is expected to reduce approximately 30% of the nozzle cleaning cost for a Korean motor company case, which will not only benefit the company economically, but will also benefit the environment.