A line-balance-based capacity planning procedure for series-type robotic assembly line

This study has presented an integrated capacity planning procedure for a series-type robotic assembly system under the consideration of line balance. The proposed approach determines both robot type and number of robots required in each workstation such that the standard deviation of workstation output rates of all workstations is minimized. This capacity planning procedure is a two-stage approach including (1) a capacity planning integer programming model, and (2) a simulation adjustment process. The mathematical model determines an initial prototype of a robotic assembly line in deterministic fashion. This is then automatically converted to a simulation model. Heuristic rules and adjustment procedure are also developed to identify potential bottleneck workstations and to propose new robot assignments (both type and number) in the simulation adjustment stage. Performance evaluation of 10 cases has shown promising results for the proposed procedure.