Browsing by Subject "Assembly-Line balancing."

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    Assembly line balancing using genetic algorithms
    (1997) Tanyer, Muzaffer
    For the last few decades, the genetic algorithms (GAs) have been used as a kind of heuristic in many areas of manufacturing. Facility layout, scheduling, process planning, and assembly line balancing are some of the areas where GAs are already popular. GAs are more efficient than traditional heuristics and also more flexible as they allow substantial changes in the problem’s constraints and in the solution approach with small changes in the program. For this reason, GAs attract the attention of both the researchers and practitioners. Chromosome structure is one of the key components of a GA. Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on the special structure of the assembly line balancing px'oblem and design a chromosome structure that operates dynamically. We propose a new mechanism to work in parallel with GAs, namely dynamic partitioning. Different from many other GA researchers, we particularly compare different population re\asion mechanisms and the effect of elitism on these mechanisms. Elitism is revised by the simulated annealing idea and various levels of elitism are created and their effects are observed. The proposed GA is £ilso compared with the traditional heuristics.
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    On the distribution of throughput of transfer lines
    (1998) Deler, Bahar
    A transfer line corresponds to a manufacturing system consisting of a number of work stations in series integrated into one system by a common transfer mechanism and a control system. There is a vast literature on the transfer lines. However, little has been done on the transient analysis of these systems by making use of the higher order moments of their performance measures due to the difficulty in determining the evolution of the stochastic processes under consideration. This thesis examines the transient behavior of relatively short transfer lines and derives the distribution of the performance measures of interest. The proposed method based on the analytical derivation of the distribution of throughput is also applied to the systems with two-part types. An experiment is designed in order to compare the results of this study with the state-space representations and the simulation. They are also interpreted from the point of view of the line behavior and design issue. Furthermore, extensions are briefly discussed and directions for future research are suggested.