Reducing worker(s) by converting assembly line into a pure cell system

Yang Yu, Jiafu Tang, Wei Sun, Yong Yin and Ikou Kaku

International Journal of Production Economics, 2013, vol. 145, issue 2, 799-806

Abstract: The line-cell conversion is established as a new production system towards converting traditional conveyor assembly line to a cell system, in which one (or multiple) worker carries out all of the operations of a job in a cell. Its performance improvement can be enhanced by reducing worker(s) without decreasing productivity. How to conduct this conversion by determining how many cells should be formatted and which workers are assigned in a cell, is a complicated decision problem. This paper presents a multi-objective line-cell conversion model with the two goals of reducing worker(s) and increasing productivity simultaneously, in a production environment that converts traditional conveyor assembly line into a pure cell system. We identify several mathematical insights on solution space of the multi-objective line-cell conversion model and prove that it is an NP-hard problem. Then we provide an improved exact algorithm to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions of the multi-objective model. Several numerical simulation experiments are performed to illustrate that the line-cell conversion can be used to reduce worker(s) and the total throughput time at the same time.

Keywords: Production mode; Line-cell conversion; Reducing worker(s); Multi-objective optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092552731300279X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:145:y:2013:i:2:p:799-806

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2013.06.009

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().