TITLE:
Solving Level Scheduling in Mixed Model Assembly Line by Simulated Annealing Method
AUTHORS:
Senthilkumar Ramalingam, Ramkumar Anna Subramanian
KEYWORDS:
Mixed Model Assembly Line, Level Schedule, Sequence, Just-in-Time Manufacturing, Simulated Annealing
JOURNAL NAME:
Circuits and Systems,
Vol.7 No.6,
May
18,
2016
ABSTRACT: This paper presents an
application of the simulated annealing algorithm to solve level schedules in
mixed model assembly line. Solving production sequences with both number of
setups and material usage rates to the minimum rate will optimize the level
schedule. Miltenburg algorithm (1989) is first used to get seed sequence to
optimize further. For this the utility time of the line and setup time requirement
on each station is considered. This seed sequence is optimized by simulated
annealing. This investigation helps to understand the importance of utility in
the assembly line. Up to 15 product sequences are taken and constructed by
using randomizing method and find the objective function value for this. For a
sequence optimization, a meta-heuristic seems much more promising to guide the
search into feasible regions of the solution space. Simulated annealing is a
stochastic local search meta-heuristic, which bases the acceptance of a
modified neighboring solution on a probabilistic scheme inspired by thermal
processes for obtaining low-energy states in heat baths. Experimental results
show that the simulated annealing approach is favorable and competitive
compared to Miltenburg’s constructive algorithm for the problems set
considered. It is proposed to found 16,985 solutions, the time taken for
computation is 23.47 to 130.35, and the simulated annealing improves 49.33%
than Miltenberg.