A space allocation algorithm for assembly line components

A component stockout during the assembly process is one of the most undesirable events that can occur since the resulting line stoppage is associated with extremely high costs. In this paper we address the problem of allocating space to components along the line, subject to practical constraints. The objective is to maximize the line fill-rate; namely, the probability of no line stoppages due to a lack of components between consecutive replenishments. A model for calculating the line fill-rate is presented. This model is then incorporated into a design algorithm that determines the space allocation. A large experiment for moderate-sized and large-scale problems is performed to evaluate the algorithm performance. Our experiment indicates this performance to be excellent, producing optimal solutions on moderate-sized problems in most cases and solutions that are better than three intuitive rules for most of the large-scale problems considered.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ms. Amy M. Brown, an M.S. student in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, for her work to code the algorithm and to perform the computational study. This study was supported in part by the awarding of NSF CAREER grants DMII 9623605 and 9996444 to Russell D. Meller.