Multi-objective design of team oriented assembly systems

This paper presents a design methodology for assembly systems based on teams, where each team is semi-autonomous with well-defined responsibilities. Team oriented assembly systems meet new objectives of modern assembly systems. At the same time, they also create a more satisfactory work environment. The design decisions include the number of teams, the precedence relationship among them, team size, and the work content of each team. The problem solving approach focuses on the structure of the product, and is based on assigning work elements to teams according to the product's Bill of Material structure. Five performance measures for the solution quality are introduced. The optimal solution procedure, based on a backtracking Branch and Bound algorithm, is proposed to solve the multi-objective design problem and find an efficiency frontier of all efficient design configurations. Based on the optimal algorithm, a quick and effective heuristic algorithm was developed for solving large-scale problems. The performance of the heuristic is demonstrated through a wide range of experiments.