Diseño de una herramienta para el Análisis del Impacto de políticas de llenado y de extracción en almacenes con líneas en paralelo sobre el rendimiento de la resecuenciación de coches en una empresa del sector del automóvil

Abstract

[EN] Currently, assembly lines in the car manufacturing industry need to be balanced in order to make good use of the existing resources, redistribute the workload uniformly and limit customer’s waiting time. One of the most popular ways of balancing assembly lines is to install buffers, which managed according to a series of techniques, are able to reorganize the sequence arriving to the assembly plant. Mix-banks, the sort of buffer installed at Ford Spain’s assembly plant, are warehouses organized in parallel lines that are generally automated. Products are introduced into the lines with available capacity through the entry point and only the products at the first position of each line are eligible to be extracted from the mix-bank. The problem to be solved is to determine whether other fill polices exist i.e. polices to feed the mix-bank, that lead to a better quality of the sequence at the exit of the warehouse. In this master thesis, a tool has been developed (with VBA, C# and R) to generate potential sequences, simulate the performance of a real mix-bank and analyze the obtained results. To assess these fill polices in even conditions, a Branch and Bound has been configured to determine unit extraction at the exit of the mix-bank. Making use of this tool, four different experiments have been conducted to solve the aforementioned problem. Starting from a simple case, each of the next experiments conducted represented a more faithful representation of the real problem. Hence, the final experiment has been conducted using a real sequence provided by Ford Spain. Through this exercise several insights have been gathered that might have potential to be applied in today’s plant operations. In addition, future research lines have been uncovered to further expand knowledge in this field.