Reconfigurable assembly systems enable a family of products to be assembled in a single system by adjusting and reconfiguring fixtures according to each product. The sharing of fixtures among different products impacts their robustness to fixture variation due to trade offs in fixture design (to allow the accommodation of the family in the single system) and to frequent reconfigurations. This p...

Due to the variety of products, simultaneous production of different models has an important role in production systems. Moreover, considering the realistic constraints in designing production lines attracted a lot of attentions in recent researches. Since the assembly line balancing problem is NP-hard, efficient methods are needed to solve this kind of problems. In this study, a new hybrid met...

This paper considers job shop scheduling problem followed by an assembly stage and Lot Streaming (LS). It is supposed here that a number of products have been ordered to be produced. Each product is assembled with a set of several parts. The production system includes two stages. The first stage is a job shop to produce parts. Each machine can process only one part at the same time. The second ...

Assembly of high precision products is often done manually. The main reasons are the complexity of automation and the production volumes that often remain small to medium. Watches, medical devices and sensors are some examples of products requiring high precision assembly: often expensive products with high margins. It is interesting to notice that achieving higher assembly yield allows for rel...

This paper considers a two-stage assembly flow shop problem (TAFSP) where m machines are in the first stage and an assembly machine is in the second stage. The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of earliness and tardiness time for n available jobs. JIT seeks to identify and eliminate waste components including over production, waiting time, transportation, inventory, movement and defective...

Assembly is the capstone process for product realization where component parts and subassemblies integrated together to form the final products. As product variety increases due to the shift from m production to mass customization, assembly systems must be designed and operated to handle such variety. In this paper we first review the state of the art research in the areas of assembly system de...

In recent years, a significant growth of mini and micro products’ market shares has been detected. However, the assembly systems and assembly processes of larger products cannot be transferred to mini or micro products in an acceptable way, which results of the special physical properties of small components. Apart from new materials, special problems with handling and tolerances of these produ...

this paper considers a two-stage assembly flow shop problem (tafsp) where m machines are in the first stage and an assembly machine is in the second stage. the objective is to minimize a weighted sum of earliness and tardiness time for n available jobs. jit seeks to identify and eliminate waste components including over production, waiting time, transportation, inventory, movement and defective...

This paper describes the development of a robotic assembly system for the assembly of consumer products in the food and personal care industry. Most commercially available manipulators are equipped with PID motion controllers which are suited for pick-and-place operations. Here we considered assembly of products under conditions of geometric deviations, a task for which PID controllers are less...