Analysis of Strategies for Installing Parallel Stations in Assembly Systems

An assembly system (AS), a valuable tool for mass production, is generally composed of a number of workstations and a transport system. While the workstations perform some preplanned operations, the transport system moves the assemblies by special designed pallets from one station to another. One common problem associated with automatic assembly systems is that some assembly operations may have relatively long cycle times. As a consequence, the productivity, as determined by the operations with the longest cycle time, can be reduced significantly. Therefore, special forms of parallel workstations were developed to improve the performance of an assembly system. In this paper, three most commonly used parallel stations: on-line, off-line and tunnel-gated stations in a free transfer assembly system are studied via discrete event simulation. Our findings revealed that the off-line parallel system has the best performance because the two independent parallel stations can lower the buffer requirement; reduce the sensitivity to variability of processing time and balance of a line. On-line parallel systems were found to have a relatively poor performance, because the operations of two parallel stations block each other, and higher buffer capacity is required to achieve similar capacity. The tunnel-gated system was more efficient than the on-line system since the first parallel station can operate independently. More importantly, we have quantified the productivity of the three different strategies mentioned. Engineers can choose the optimal strategies for installing parallel stations under their working environment.