Title: Modelling of parallel production system with rework paths and its GA based simulator for optimal design

Authors: Khalid R. Al-Momani, Jaber E. Abu Qudeiri

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P. O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan. ' Mechatronics Engineering Department, Philadelphia University, P.O. Box 1, Amman 19392, Jordan

Abstract: Production lines are widely used in high volume industries and vary in their sophistication from simple to the complicated structured such as parallel, reworks, feed-forward, etc. One of the common production styles in many modern industries is the parallel production system with rework path (PPS-RP) and one of the methods used for studying the PPS-RP design is through genetic algorithm (GA). As a one of the important tasks in using GA is how to express a chromosome. This paper attempts to find the nearest optimal design of a PPS-RP that will maximise production efficiency by optimising the following two decision variables: buffer size between each pair of work stations and machine numbers in each of the work stations. In order to do this, a new GA-simulation based method to find the nearest optimal design for the proposed PPS-RP is introduced. For efficient use of GA, the used GA methodology is based on a technique that is called non-homogeneous gene arrangement method (NGAM) which arranges the genes inside individuals. An experimental numerical examples showed that after a number of operations based on the proposed simulator, it was possible to get the nearest optimal design of PPS-RP.

Keywords: parallel production systems; PPS; production system design; buffer size; rework paths; genetic algorithms; GAs; optimal design; production efficiency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2011.042109

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2011 Vol.23 No.1/2, pp.69 - 81

Published online: 27 Nov 2014 *

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