Abstract:
Assembly line of Wheeled Security Vehicle (MUHAFIZ) has been studied to analyze and evaluate the present system of manufacturing the vehicle with a view to balance the assembly line, eliminate wastes, reduce balance delay, increase production rate and improve line efficiency through a novel approach of coding into Tomlab(optimization software).To achieve optimized result, precedence among tasks was carefully determined. Next the grouping of tasks was done by assigning optimal number of operators with parallel consideration of space constraint. Tomlab code was then run on this carefully calculated grouping of tasks in line with precedence relations. Substantial increase in line efficiency with far better balanced station times were achieved by the adopted methodology. The approach can be applied at line balancing problems ranging from few to hundreds of work elements to achieve minimum cycle time with far less computational effort.
SIMUL-8 has been used as simulation software to validate the optimization achieved through Tomlab since implementation was only possible after validating the results. By using SIMUL-8, visual model of the system/process can be drawn directly on the computer screen. Whole technique resulted in 62% reduction in assembly time, 70% reduction in idle time, 58% reduction in cycle time and 11% reduction in number of operators. Line efficiency was increased from 45% to 73%.
