A Mathematical Model for Converting Conveyor Assembly Line to Cellular Manufacturing

This paper proposes a mathematical model for converting conveyor assembly line to cellular manufacturing in complex production environments. Complex production environments refer to the situations with multi-products, variant demand, different batch sizes and the worker abilities varying with work stations and products respectively. The model proposed in this paper aims to determine (1) how many cells should be formatted; (2) how many workers should be assigned in each cell; (3) and how many workers should be rested in shortened conveyor line when a conveyor assembly line should be converted, in order to optimize system performances which are defined as the total throughput time and total labor power. We refer the model to a new production system. Such model can be used as an evaluation tool in the cases of (i) when a company wants to change its production system (usually a belt conveyor line) to a new one (including cell manufacturing); (ii) when a company wants to evaluate the performance of its converted system. Simulation experiments based on the data collected from the previous documents are used to estimate the marginal impact that each factor change has had on the estimated performance improvement resulting from the conversion.