A GRASP for simultaneously assigning and sequencing product families on flexible assembly lines

作者：Heath Susan K^*; Bard Jonathan F; Morrice Douglas J

来源：Annals of Operations Research, 2013, 203(1): 295-323.

DOI：10.1007/s10479-012-1167-5

• GRASP
• Production sequencing
• Nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes
• Nonlinear integer programming

This paper introduces a new model and solution methodology for a real-world production scheduling problem arising in the electronics industry. The production environment is a high volume, just-in-time, make-to-order facility with volatile demand over many product families that are assembled on flexible lines. A distinguishing characteristic of the problem is the presence of non-traditional sequence-dependant setup costs, which complicate our ability to find high-quality solutions. The scheduling problem arose when product variety exceeded the mix that the existing lines could accommodate. A nonlinear integer programming formulation is presented for the problem of minimizing setup costs, and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is developed to find solutions. To select the GRASP parameter values, an efficient, space-filling experimental design method is used based on nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes. The proposed methodology is tested on actual factory data and compared to a prior heuristic presented in the literature; our heuristic provides a cost savings in 7 out of the 10 cases examined, and an average improvement of 17.39 % which is shown to be highly statistically significant. This improvement is due in part to the introduction of a pre-processing step to determine preferential and non-preferential line assignment information.

• 出版日期2013-3