Redesigning of production lines Using Heuristic Algorithm for better productivity

Abstract

Production lines are of great importance in today’s production system of high quantity and quality of standardized products. Therefore, it is obvious that the production system needs to be designed more efficiently to cope up with the optimized production efficacy so that the cost of production gets minimized. This paper addresses a heuristic method to analyse an existing production system having multiple unit production lines running parallel. In this study, an attempt is being made to redesign an existing production system by merging the possible workstations of two-unit production parallel lines to minimize the total idle time and hence to obtain better productivity. This project has been carried out in a semi-automated wax slabbing and packaging unit of an oil refinery situated in Assam, India. The production system of the unit has been studied by collecting primary data of station time and activity time of all the workstations. After analysing the production system with the proposed heuristic method, two configurations of the lines have been evaluated to reduce the total number of workstations and thereby to reduce the total cost of production. The similar type of production system shall be more effective if the proposed method is applied during the design stage of the production system for better utilization of the resources to achieve lean production system.