Investigating the performance improvement by conversion of assembly line configuration to a pure cell system in manufacturing industry

Seru production systems implement reconfiguration of traditional assembly lines to a flexible cell system that aim at reducing the required workforce while at the same time augmenting the productivity manifold. For evaluating the overall performance improvement, cell formatting and assigning workers to serus takes form of a complicated decision problem. In this paper, with the objective of reducing the total cost for training the worker, minimising the processing time and the total throughput time, mathematical insights on the solution space of a multi-objective line-cell conversion model are identified, in turn proving it to be an NP-hard model. By applying the proposed heuristic algorithm on several numerical simulations, a Pareto-optimal solution of this multi-objective model is obtained. With experimental results and comparative studies, the proposed approach proves its effectiveness that may lead to further improvement in seru production systems competitive advantage to cope with fluctuating market demands by enhancing the flexibility as well as the efficiency of the system. [Submitted: 18 June 2016; Revised 29: August 2017; Revised: 25 August 2018; Revised: 5 December 2018; Accepted: 8 January 2019]