Reconfiguration of assembly systems: From conveyor assembly line to serus

Confronted with the dynamic and complex market environments, the traditional conveyor assembly line can no longer meet customers’ demands effectively. The way of reconfiguring conveyor assembly line to a more flexible manufacturing system has been attracting considerable attention both in the academics and production practices. Seru system, also called assembly cell system, is regarded as one of the most successful innovations of manufacturing system in reconfiguring conveyor assembly line. Such a manufacturing system merges considerable flexibility of job shops and high efficiency of conveyor assembly lines to some extent. In this paper, we investigate the problem of how to reconfigure conveyor assembly line to serus. A comprehensive mathematical model incorporating two issues of how many serus should be established and how many workers should be assigned to each seru is developed. Then the model is investigated by an industrial case and compared to Kaku's model with respect to the selected plan. The computation results validate that the proposed model is more suitable to analyze the reconfiguration problems from conveyor assembly line to serus.

► We investigate the problem of how to reconfigure conveyor assembly line to serus.
► A mathematical model in the view of makespan is developed to solve this problem.
► The proposed model is investigated by an industrial case.
► The propose model is compared to Kaku's model with respect to the selected plan.
► The computation results validate the model is more suitable to analyze the problem.