Partitioning Manual Assembly Workstations for Flexible Manufacturing

Many production processes are still realized with manual assembly, due to its flexibility and efficiency. The individual needs of the customers lead to a bigger variety of products and components in manual assembly workstations. With the variety of the components and products, the scope of the manual assembly workstation as well as its overall complexity increases. In this paper, we present a method to counter this effect by dividing the manual workstation into multiple subsystems. Our method minimizes the number of times a worker has to switch between the individual subsystems in order to search for components. Experimental results indicate that our method performs better on this task compared to other approaches and can this way be used to increase the productivity of a manual assembly workstation.