Title: An approach towards scalability for reconfigurable product flow line through unbalancing

Authors: Faisal Hasan; P.K. Jain; Dinesh Kumar

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttrakhand, India ' Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttrakhand, India ' Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttrakhand, India

Abstract: A timely and cost effective response to dynamic market scenario is becoming one of the key factors for the success of manufacturing enterprises. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems are recognised as the next generation manufacturing systems, which are responsive to these market changes. One of the major challenges which need to be addressed for designing and operating such systems include implementing scalability within these systems. In the past, some strategies have been proposed for scalability aspect based on routing flexibility and stage paralleling. In this paper, an approach based on 'unbalancing' is proposed as a potential technique for scalability of reconfigurable product flow lines. The proposed approach is based on the fact that productivity variations may be achieved from a flow line by varying the degree of imbalance in mean operation time values at stations on the product line. The proposed approach is demonstrated using a coupled reconfigurable product flow line.

Keywords: scalability; reconfigurable manufacturing systems; RMS; throughput; bowl phenomenon; reconfigurable product flow lines; unbalancing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOM.2013.055962

International Journal of Modelling in Operations Management, 2013 Vol.3 No.2, pp.118 - 133

Received: 10 Nov 2012
Accepted: 10 Mar 2013
Published online: 29 Jan 2014 *

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