Intelligent workload balance control of the assembly process considering condition-based maintenance |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, Hong Kong, China;2. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China;1. State Key Laboratory of Mechanical Transmissions, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China;2. College of Mechanical Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China;3. School of Intelligent Manufacturing Engineering, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing 402160, China;1. Engineering of Systems and Environment, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, United States;2. University of California Los Angeles, United States;1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, PR China;2. Beijing Institute of Electronic System Engineering, Beijing, PR China;3. School of Economics and Management, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China;4. School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, PR China;5. HKU-ZIRI Lab for Physical Internet, Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China |
| |
| Abstract: | Balancing the workloads of workstations is key to the efficiency of an assembly line. However, the initial balance can be broken by the changing processing abilities of machines because of machine degradation, and at some point, re-balancing of the line is inevitable. Nevertheless, the impacts of unexpected events on assembly line re-balancing are always ignored. With the advanced sensor technologies and Internet of Things, the machine degradation process can be monitored continuously, and condition-based maintenance can be implemented to improve the health state of each machine. With the technology of robotic process automation, workflows of the assembly process can be smoothed and workstations can work autonomously together. A higher level of process automation can be achieved. Real-time information of the processing abilities of machines will bring new opportunities for automated workload balance via adaptive decision-making. In this study, a fuzzy control system is developed to make real-time decisions to balance the workloads based on the processing abilities of workstations, given the policy of condition-based maintenance. Fuzzy controllers are used to decide whether to re-balance the assembly line and how to adjust the production rate of each workstation. The numerical experiments show that the buffer level of the assembly line with the proposed fuzzy control system is lower than that of the assembly line without any control system and the buffer level of the assembly line with another control system is the lowest. The demand can always be satisfied by assembly lines except the one with another control system since there is too much production loss sacrificed for the low buffer level. The sensitivity analysis of the control performance to the parameter settings is also conducted. Thus, the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy control system is demonstrated, and intelligent automation can improve the performance of the assembly process by the fuzzy control system since real-time information of the assembly line can be used for adaptive decision-making. |
| |
| Keywords: | Assembly line re-balancing Machine degradation Condition-based maintenance Fuzzy control system Intelligent automation Robotic process automation |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
