Paper Info
Title
Studying Unbalanced Workload And Buffer Allocation Of Production Systems Using Multi-Objective Optimisation
Abstract
Numerous studies have investigated the effects of unbalanced service times and inter-station buffer sizes on the efficiency of discrete part, unpaced production lines. There are two main disadvantages of many of these studies: (1) only some predetermined degree of imbalance and patterns of imbalance have been evaluated against the perfectly balanced configuration, making it hard to form a general conclusion on these factors; (2) only a single objective has been set as the target, which neglects the fact that different patterns of imbalance may outperform with respect to different performance measures. Therefore, the aim of this study is to introduce a new approach to investigate the performance of unpaced production lines by using multiple-objective optimisation. It has been found by equipping multi-objective optimisation with an efficient, equality constraints handling technique, both the optimal pattern and degree of imbalance, as well as the optimal relationship among these factors and the performance measures of a production system can be sought and analysed with some single optimisation runs. The results have illustrated that some very interesting relationships among the key performance measures studied, including system throughput, work-in-process and average buffer level, could only be observed within a truly multi-objective optimisation context. While these results may not be generalised to apply to any production lines, the genericity of the proposed simulation-based approach is believed to be applicable to study any real-world, complex production lines.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1080/00207543.2017.1362121
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Keywords
DocType
Volume
design of production systems, simulation optimisation, evolutionary algorithms, manufacturing systems engineering & multi-objective optimisation
Journal
55
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
24
0020-7543
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
19
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amos H. C. Ng16912.34
Sabry Shaaban2185.42
Jacob Bernedixen3202.69