Competitiveness is highly important in automotive industry. Customers’ satisfaction is decisive and that has turned out in high vehicle customization. Customization implies for example that a vehicle model can include several types of engines; inferring in high engine model variety on the assembly systems. Production lines balancing and ergonomic factors within assembly operations usually trigger unbalances on the logistics resources utilization. A proper feeding policy selection can palliate the impact of the unbalances generated by the assembly operations, improve the performance of the system and reduce cost. Selection among different policies is often done by following qualitative criteria which are influenced by product structure, operational constraints, company-specific practices and tradition. This project consists of the development of a decision support system for feeding policy selection in production settings. This system will automatically select the feeding policy at a single component level and evaluate the impact brought by this decision when interacting with the production setting.
Research proposal, PhD programme, University of Skövde