Automobile Engine Assembly Line in an Automobile Industry

Abstract

Manufacturing industries give importance to the reduction of energy consumption due to the increase in energy cost and to create an eco-friendly environment. Assembly line is considered to be one of the cost intensive systems. Robots are recently being used to perform the assembly tasks instead of manual labor. There is a requirement of efficiently balancing the assembly line by allocating equal amount of work to workstations and assignment of best-fit robot to perform the tasks allocated to those workstations. Establishment and use of a process that is most efficient is always be the prime concern, but due to some or the other reasons, they are not able to do so. Practically, it is not feasible to obtain ideal efficiency because there is something which is lost in every process which is waste or error. Waste reduces the efficiency of the process and also demands requirement of special equipment. The industries need to focus on optimization of process by shortening the time between the customer order and the product build due to shipment by addressing sources of waste. Workstation stability and continuous improvement mapping are the techniques used for reducing manufacturing wastes and increasing efficiency; for such process, several parameters are being identified in an industry, also evaluations are done on a monthly basis, and comparisons are followed with the predetermined standards to identify the scope of improvement to increase the efficiency and reduce waste. Depending upon the priorities of the management, the primary focus is on reducing either cycle time or total energy consumption; for that, suitable models could be selected. The proposed models are useful to reduce the total energy consumption and cycle time in robotic assembly lines. It is observed that the computation time for the time-based model is less compared to energy-based model.