Capacity management of modular assembly systems

Companies handling large product portfolio often face challenges that stem from market dynamics. Therefore, in production management, efficient planning approaches are required that are able to cope with the variability of the order stream to maintain the desired rate of production. Modular assembly systems offer a flexible approach to react to these changes, however, there is no all-encompassing methodology yet to support long and medium term capacity management of these systems. The paper introduces a novel method for the management of product variety in assembly systems, by applying a new conceptual framework that supports the periodic revision of the capacity allocation and determines the proper system configuration. The framework has a hierarchical structure to support the capacity and production planning of the modular assembly systems both on the long and medium term horizons. On the higher level, a system configuration problem is solved to assign the product families to dedicated, flexible or reconfigurable resources, considering the uncertainty of the demand volumes. The lower level in the hierarchy ensures the cost optimal production planning of the system by optimizing the lot sizes as well as the required number of resources. The efficiency of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through the results of an industrial case study from the automotive sector. © 2017 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers