A GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR DETERMINING FACILITY DESIGN AND CONFIGURATIONOF SINGLE-STAGE FLEXIBLE ELECTRONIC ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

Consider the production of an evolving family of similar electronic pr oducts, each having a short product lifecycle. The fundamental product ion resources used for assembly are inherently flexible, that is, reco nfigurable and reprogrammable. Two distinct strategies can be followed in configuring production facilities: focused facilities, where a fac ility is dedicated to one product at a time but may be reassigned, and nonfocused facilities, where setup operations permit a variety of pro ducts to be produced during a given planning period. When focused faci lities are used, either exclusively or in combination with nonfocused facilities, products must be assigned to specific facilities. If the f acilities are not identical, and capacity is limited, then changing pr oduction requirements may force reassignment of products from one faci lity to another. Thus, the product assignment/reassignment decision ma y have a significant impact on the production capacity required and is a central issue in deciding the strategic configuration of facilities -focused, nonfocused, or hybrid. This paper describes and formulates t he strategic configuration problem and then presents a methodology for determining facility configuration, capacity levels, and product assi gnments for a single-stage electronic assembly system. A genetic algor ithm based search heuristic is proposed and tested. Computational resu lts indicate that the heuristic performs well in terms of both speed a nd accuracy.