A Heuristic Method for Two-sided Assembly Line Reconfiguration in IoT Environment

Abstract

This paper focuses on the two-sided assembly line reconfiguration problem when the market demands change. Firstly, the Internet of Things (IoT) based framework is proposed to support the collaborative reconfiguration of the workers, tools and parts logistic related with the reassigned task by linking the physical workstations and the cyber ones in the two-sided assembly line. Then, a heuristic method based on the position-oriented enumerative procedure is proposed to deal with the two-sided assembly line rebalancing problem to compute the reassigned tasks among the workstations. The objective is to minimize the tasks reassignment, which keeps the new lines as close as possible to the original ones to minimize the reconfiguration costs. Finally, the proposed algorithm is tested on the benchmark problems, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.