• IE interfaces
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-46
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• 1992

This paper deals with analysis of material handling system efficiency of a heat-exchanger manufacturing line. This line is a typical flow shop type assembly line which consists of 10 steps of assembly stations. Each station have one or two workers who assemble and move components for the job, and no special transporters for component's movement. Therfore, all the workers are involoved in unnecessary moving activities which decrease overall production efficiencies of the line. To improve productivities, production outputs and worker's job performances for this assembly line, the several alternatives are considered such as installing new conveyor lines and automatic guided vehicle(AGV) system. Analyzing economic feasibilities and responses of the system alternatives, an experimental simulation model is built suing SIMAN Ver. 3. 5 simulation language with CINEMA package for animation of the process flow. Through this animation process a vivid picturial analysis could performed on the process flow.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.117-122
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• 2005

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.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.57-64
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• 2021

The domestic semiconductor industry can produce various products that will satisfy customer needs by diversifying assembly parts and increasing compatibility between them. It is necessary to improve the production line as a method to reduce the work-in-process inventory (WIP) in the assembly line, the idle time of the worker, and the idle time of the process. The improvement of the production line is to balance the capabilities of each process as a whole, and to determine the timing of product input or the order of the work process so that the time required between each process is balanced. The purpose of this study is to find the optimal WIP and buffer size through SA (Simulated Annealing) that minimizes lead time while matching the number of two parts in a parallel assembly line with bottleneck process. The WIP level and buffer size obtained by the SA algorithm were applied to the CONWIP and DBR systems, which are the existing production systems, and the simulation was performed by applying them to the new hybrid production system. Here, the Hybrid method is a combination of CONWIP and DBR methods, and it is a production system created by setting new rules. As a result of the Simulation, the result values were derived based on three criteria: lead time, production volume, and work-in-process inventory. Finally, the effect of the hybrid production method was verified through comparative analysis of the result values.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.1-22
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• 1993

This paper deals with the problem of mixed model assembly line balancing. In mixed model assembly lines, tsks should be assigned to stations in such a manner that all stations have approximately the same amount of work on a production cycle basis. Further in balancing assembly lines, the related tasks, the performing task side and the team tasks should be considered to improve work methods, to give more job satisfaction to workers, and to allow greater flexibility in the design of assembly lines. In this paper, the heuristic dispatch assignment rule is developed to assign evenly tasks of each model to all stations. The heuristic method based on the assignment rule developed is presented for mixed model assembly line balancing with the considerations of the related tasks, the performing task side, and the team tasks. The proposed method is analyzed, and compared with other methods for line balancing.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.91-106
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• 1994

In mixed model assembly lines, products are assembled seqeuntially that have different combination of options specified by customers. In just in time (JIT) environment, production smoothing becomes an important issue for sub-lines which supply the necessary parts to each workstation of the assembly line. Another important issue is to avoid line stopping caused by work overload in workstations. To find a sequence which minimizes the costs associated with line stoppage and the option parts inventory level, a nonlinear mixed integer programming is formulated. Recognizing the limit of the Branch and Bound technique in large sized problems, a heuristic solution procedure is proposed. The performance of the heuristic is compared with the Branch and Bound technique through randomly generated test problems. The computational results indicate that on the average the heuristic solutions deviate approximately 3.6% from the optimal solutions.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.381-388
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• 1997

This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm to efficiently perform line balancing in the PCB assembly line including multiple surface mounters efficiently. Generally, the problems in line balancing are classified into two kinds. Firstly, is the determining of the minimum number of machines required for achieving the desired production rate. Secondly, is the assign of jobs to multiple machines in order to minimize the cycle time which is defined as a maximum among the working times of machines when the number of machines is fixed. In this paper, we deal with the latter. We consider a PCB assembly line, including the multiple surface mounters arranged serially as a target system. Also, the conveyor is assumed to move at a constant speed and have no buffer. Considering that the minimum number of machines required for the desired production rate is a discrete nonincreasing function which is inversely proportional to the cycle time, we propose an optimization algorithm for line balancing by using the binary search method. The algorithm is validated through computer simulation, the results of which show that their shapes coincide nearly with those of optimal line balancing efficiency graphs regardless of the number of components, the performance of surface mounters, and the structure of assembly line.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.10 no.12
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• pp.3863-3869
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• 2009

In recent years, globalization of markets and increased consumer sophistication in automotive industry have led to an increase in the variety of products and a consequent increase in the number of variants of any given product line that a manufacturer must supply. Also, the modularity trend of automotive production systems greatly affects on the production systems of automotive parts suppliers. These typically requires the implementation of cost efficient, flexible production systems, so called mixed-model assembly lines. We studied the problems of mixed-model assembly and assembly error-preventing techniques, and developed the error-preventing monitoring system using RFID in the mixed-model automotive parts assembly line. Especially, this study aimed to solve the problems and supplement the existing systems for preventing assembly errors, by developing a monitoring system using RFID to minimize the issues currently occurring in the field of automotive parts assembly, such as losses from incorrect installation and omission.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.209-219
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• 2015

This paper deals with a case study about productivity improvement in medium and small-sized manufacturing factories. It is popular to improve the productivity of lines by shortening the production cycles and assigning multi jobs to workers. We analyze the production lines and improve the productivity in the case study through multi-functional workers and shortened production lines. Based on the case study, we propose some guidelines to improve the productivity of production lines.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.59-73
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• 1991

In this paper, how to evaluate the assembly system was studied. The traction machine(TRM/C) is a kind of medium sized small quantity product. This work was performed on restriction of satisfying the customer's demand by simulating on the criteria of the queuing quantity in production system, the effectiveness of assembly machine and the average time spent on assembling. The problems about assembling were grasped through the analysis of products and process. The outputs of simulations that used SIMAN on four alternatives were evaluated on the basis of the average queuing quantity, the line effectiveness, the assembly time of a product and the production capacity.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.20 no.43
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• pp.1-16
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• 1997

This paper improves the autonomy for supplier's schedule and the flexibility of the final assembly line. The final assembly line is a single work station and each product taking different assembly time is considered. In the assembly schedule, the heuristic method based on the goal chasing method is used. Consequently, suppliers can independently determine their output rates and thus, change their workload pattern according to their needs and priorities. Moreover, this flexibility can help to avoid expensive final-assembly-line stoppages in case of sudden part supply disruptions. The sequencing method can be easily implemented into an existing just-in-time system. In addition, the mathematical model was formulated and the algorithm was explained through the flow chart. The numerical example was given and the efficiency of this method is shown through the analysis of computational results of that example.