Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Manufacturing Systems – ICMaS

Published by Editura Academiei Române, ISSN 1842-3183

Volume No. 1,  2006

"Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Machine and Manufacturing Systems Department

Bucharest, Romania, 26 – 27 October, 2006

Abstract: Many reconfigurable conveyor-components have been developed for the construction assembly line systems. The components have different transporting paths, shapes, sizes, etc. This paper describes a genetic algorithm to configure those reconfigurable conveyor-components forming a flexible assembly line system to meet the ever-changing production requirements. The transporting paths, shapes and sizes of reconfigurable conveyor-components are coded into binary string as chromosome to represent an assembly line layout for analysis and evaluation. The three evolutionary processes generate the layouts: selection, crossover, and mutation. The process of updating control parameters is integrated into the genetic algorithm  to improve the performance and efficiency of the evolutionary processes. The reconfiguration of a flexible  assembly line system to meet the requirements of minimization of the number of  reconfigurable conveyor- components and the provision of alternative processes paths are discussed in detail in the paper.

Dr. Eng. Adriana FOTA, Assoc. Prof., "Transilvania" University

of Braşov, Economic Engineering and Manufacturing

Systems Department, Romania, E-mail: fota.a@unitbv.ro