Research of Dynamic Material Handling in an Automobile General Assembly Line Based on Real-time Information

The status of material delivery of an automobile general assembly line is analyzed, and the technique to achieve the real-time tracking of assembly status information is proposed based on RFID（ Radio Frequency Identification）. Thus the consumption of line-side buffer is obtained dynamically, then the type and quantity of needed material are fed back to the subsystem of material handling; the algorithm for determining the best time departure time of delivery driver based on minimizing of total time penalty function is proposed. This approach makes the material amount of a single delivery trip maximized and improves the efficiency of delivery drivers significantly in the case of does not affect the assembly line normal throughput. Additionally, although this dynamic material handling method is developed for the automobile assembly plant, it should be pointed out that this method is also applicable to other mixed model assembly plants such as electronics, semiconductor and aerospace industry.