Automotive Industry Line Board Optimization Through Operations Research Techniques

The automotive industry has suffering a lot with the current economic crisis that affects the country and, at this critical moment, more than never, they have been looking for methods to optimize their production, reducing wastes as much as possible. This paper concerns about optimization of a physical arrangement in a production line board from an automotive industry. This line board has 17 workstations (WS), each of them has been divided into 4 clusters of racks containing the parts to assembly. The goal is to get an optimized layout for these racks, which can be of different sizes and purposes, into these clusters, to maximize the area use. Those racks should accommodate assembly parts (put in boxes) in an optimized way too. This problem was treated as a Cutting and Packing Problems (CPP). In order to optimize the clusters (1st. problem), it was used a two-dimensional CPP and we proposed the use of Wang Algorithm to solve it, taking into account the demand constraints for each cluster, the racks dimensions to be assigned into them and the distances among them in order to allow the operator passage to pick up the parts to assembly. Doing these definitions, the algorithm was executed separately for each cluster and it is proposed a new layout. For the optimization of the boxes layout which are in the racks (2nd. Problem), it was a one-dimensional CPP and we proposed the algorithms First Fit (FF); First Fit Decreasing (FFD); Best Fit (BF) e Best Fit Decreasing (BFD) to solve it, in a comparatively way, in order to maximize the quantity of boxes in the racks. For that, it was considered the boxes sizes, the required quantity of each of them and the process constraints.