DESIGN OF ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS FOR MODULAR PRODUCTS

To respond to the challenge of agile manufacturing, companies are stri ving to provide a large variety of products at a low cost. Product mod ularity allows to produce different products by combining standard com ponents. One of the characteristics of modular products is that they s hare the same assembly operations for a part of their structure. The s pecial structure of modular products provides challenges and opportuni ties for the design of assembly systems, Given a family of modular pro ducts, designing low cost assembly systems is an important problem. In this paper, an approach for the design of assembly systems for modula r products is proposed. The assembly system is decomposed into two sub systems based on the structure of modular products. The configuration problem of the assembly system is formulated and solved by a tabu sear ch based algorithm.