To respond to the challenge of agile manufacturing, companies are striving to provide a large variety of products at a low cost. Product modularity allows production of different products by combining standard components. One of the characteristics of modular products is that they share the same assembly operations for a part of their structure. The special structure of modular products provides challenges and opportunities for the design of assembly systems. Given a family of modular products, designing low cost assembly systems is an important problem. In this paper, an approach for the design of assembly systems for modular products is proposed. The assembly system is decomposed into two subsystems based on the structure of modular products. The configuration problem of the assembly system is formulated and solved by a tabu search based algorithm
Published in:
Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on
(Volume:13
,
Issue:
5
)
Date of Publication: Oct 1997