A Heuristic Approach to Solve an Industrial Scalability Problem

In recent years, the rapid change of market demand is increasing the need for scalability as a key characteristic of manufacturing systems. Scalability allows production capacity to be rapidly and cost-effectively reconfigured in different situation with different requirements and constraints. Our industrial partners are facing quarterly scalability problems involving a multi-unit and multi-product manufacturing system. In this paper, an original approach is presented to solve this kind of problems. Starting from the original manufacturing system configuration and process plan, a set of practical principles are introduced to seek for the feasible configurations; a GA is designed to search in the global solution space. A balancing objective function is defined and used to rank the proposed configurations. A real case study with 4-unit / 4-product situation demonstrates both the validity and efficiency of the proposed approach.