A Study on Flexible Pallet Design for Assembly Rationalization

In the assembly system, a pallet plays an important role of transfer and storage. As products become various, many different pallets are also necessary. Since some of them are redundant, a design of pallet with high flexibility is important. This paper suggests design alternatives, in designing pallets with high flexibility. The purpose of this study is to rationalize assembly process of mid-small size products. Every pallet has suitability values depending on characteristic factors of a product, and this value is determined by using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) technique. As the characteristic factors of a product are changed, the suitability value is also changed. Design alternatives can be found by tracing change of the suitability value, which are based on correlation between the characteristic factors of a product and a pallet element.