O. Grunder et al., THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL LAYOUT OF THE WORK STATIONS ANDTHE PRODUCTIVITY OF A SATURATED SINGLE-HOIST PRODUCTION LINE, International Journal of Production Research, 35(8), 1997, pp. 2189-2211
Citations number
19
Categorie Soggetti
Engineering,"Operatione Research & Management Science
Over the past fifteen years a growing number of research workers have
become interested in the problem of how to optimize the productivity o
f treatment lines fed by one of several hoists. Their work has concent
rated mainly on scheduling the moves of the hoist. However, the layout
of the stations is always taken as a constant. The aim of this paper
is to underline the relationship between the physical layout of the st
ations and the productivity of a treatment line. We focus on saturated
single-hoist production lines. After introducing a model of this prob
lem, we focus on a particular class of layout that is commonly used by
industrial users. We show first that this class does minimize the hoi
st moving time during a cycle time. In the following part, we show tha
t this particular class of layout is, however, not dominant in all cas
es for maximizing the productivity of the line. Before concluding our
study, we propose a branch and bound algorithm to process the optimal
layout for maximizing the productivity of a saturated single-hoist pro
duction line. The studies show that this procedure is very efficient.