You are required to read and agree to the below before accessing a full-text version of an article in the IDE article repository.

The full-text document you are about to access is subject to national and international copyright laws. In most cases (but not necessarily all) the consequence is that personal use is allowed given that the copyright owner is duly acknowledged and respected. All other use (typically) require an explicit permission (often in writing) by the copyright owner.

For the reports in this repository we specifically note that

  • the use of articles under IEEE copyright is governed by the IEEE copyright policy (available at http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/copyrightpolicy.html)

  • the use of articles under ACM copyright is governed by the ACM copyright policy (available at http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/)

  • technical reports and other articles issued by M‰lardalen University is free for personal use. For other use, the explicit consent of the authors is required

  • in other cases, please contact the copyright owner for detailed information

By accepting I agree to acknowledge and respect the rights of the copyright owner of the document I am about to access.

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact webmaster@ide.mdh.se

Handling product variety in a mixed-product assembly line

Authors:

Narges Asadi, Mats Jackson, Anders Fundin

Research group:

Product and Production Development

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

International Conference on Engineering Design 2015

Abstract

In today’s fast-changing global market, using mixed-product assembly lines (MPALs) and mixed-model assembly lines (MMALs) allows manufacturing companies to be flexible and to maintain their competitive edge through product variety. Balancing and sequencing issues have been recognized as the main challenges of MPALs and MMALs, but other practical needs of MPALs remain unclear. Recognizing the practical needs of MPALs helps in identifying related requirements for product design, leading to products that closely align with the MPAL concept. The objective of this paper is to offer an industrial perspective on the needs of MPALs and to identify its requirements vis-à-vis product design. To achieve this objective, a single real-time case study in a heavy-vehicle-manufacturing company has been performed. The results from this industrial case study suggest that in order to handle product variety in MPALs and to reduce the related complexity, certain dimensions of flexibility need to be created in the assembly system, and requirements related to product design should be considered simultaneously in order to support assembly processes.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Asadi3890,
author = {Narges Asadi and Mats Jackson and Anders Fundin},
title = {Handling product variety in a mixed-product assembly line},
month = {July},
year = {2015},
booktitle = {International Conference on Engineering Design 2015},
url = {http://www.ipr.mdu.se/publications/3890-}
}