Title: Joint consideration of assembly-line production smoothing and finished-goods delivery efficiency in an automobile plant

Authors: Fong-Yuen Ding, Jingxu He

Addresses: Columbia International University, 7435 Monticello Rd., SC 29203, USA. ' Bayer Business and Technology Services, 8500 West Bay Rd., Baytown, TX 77584, USA

Abstract: This paper presents a Heuristic solution procedure to achieve an integrated consideration of production scheduling on the assembly line and the efficiency in the finished-goods delivery. For production scheduling, production smoothing in models and product attributes is considered; for finished-goods delivery, it considers effective grouping of finished goods and even distribution in delivery dates for a destination, in order to ship products as they are produced. The Heuristic procedure first forms packages of units and then assigns packages to various days. The computational results based on randomly-generated problems showed the advantage in cost savings by an integrated consideration. A simulated annealing procedure is developed for package assignment.

Keywords: production smoothing; multiple product options; finished goods delivery; automobile industry; simulated annealing; assembly lines; efficiency; heuristic procedures; production scheduling; effective groupings; delivery dates; product shipments; unit packages; package assignment; cost savings; integrated consideration; assembly plants; factories; logistics systems; logistics management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2011.038991

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2011 Vol.8 No.3, pp.330 - 349

Published online: 30 Apr 2015 *

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