The new idea presented in the paper is to reverse of an assembly line in order to allow complete disassembly. A generalised Synchronised Hybrid Petri Nets (SHPN) model based control of an assembly/disassembly mechatronics line (A/DML) served by a wheeled mobile robot (WMR) equipped with robotic manipulator (RM) is presented. The approach is a hybrid one, the assembly/disassembly line being the ...

Assembly line balancing is a classic ill-structured problem where total enumeration is infeasible and optimal solutions uncertain for industrial problems. A quantitative approach to classifying problem difficulty and solution quality is therefore important. Two existing measures of difficulty, Order Strength and West Ratio are compared to a new compound expression of difficulty, Project Index. ...

The assembly line balancing problem is a non deterministic polynomial type planning problem for mass production. Layout design changes constitute a major decision that yields investment for assembly operations and numerous heuristics have been reported in the literature for solving the line balancing problems. U-shaped assembly layout offers several benefits over traditional straight-line layou...

In this paper an event and object oriented simulator for assembly lines is presented. The tool, developed in Java, is capable to simulate mixed model assembly lines, with stochastic task times, parallel stations, fixed scheduling sequences, and buffers within workstations. The simulator is a flexible supporting tool in finding solution of the mixed model assembly line balancing problem (and the...