Pareto Heuristic for Product Family-Oriented Product-Workstation Allocation Planning with Restricted Capacities

Abstract

A prerequisite for value stream design is the segmentation of products into families. This means that all products of a family are assigned to the same group of workstations so that the resulting material flows are separated as good as possible, and a higher degree of transparency is reached on the shop floor. However, since the number of workstations as well as their capacity is limited, shared resources cannot always be avoided in practice. Furthermore, the objective of product family orientation may compete with the objective of fulfilling product-workstation preferences. These preferences result, for example, from required equipment like specific tooling or from capability requirements. An optimization heuristic for this product-workstation allocation problem is presented within this article. First, the mathematical problem is formally described, then the heuristic is introduced and the required data for its application is outlined. For the evaluation, an extensive test set is generated, comparison heuristics are implemented, and solutions are made comparable through problem-specific bounds for both objectives. The results show that the solution quality of the pareto heuristic for both objective functions achieves almost the level of the comparison heuristics, which optimize only one of the objectives in isolation.