A Heuristic and Simulation Hybrid Approach for Mixed and Multi Model Assembly Line Balancing

摘要

Industry 4.0 is focused on creating smart products, procedures and processes and calls for the need to create fully dynamic reconfiguration production lines in which products move autonomously through the system from one available resource to another. Planers should be equipped with the methods and IT tools required to develop a complex planning and explanatory models to control and re-configure manufacturing resource networks and production flow based on situation. In this paper a heuristics and simulation based approach for balancing of mixed and multi model assembly line is presented. The proposed IT solution is a computer hybrid implementation of combined data-driven automatic simulation models generation and heuristic for line balancing methods. A computer implementation of the proposed solution using the FlexSim simulation software with a practical example of its application are presented as well.