Development of New Method for Choosing Standard Components Subject to Minimal Cycle Time and Minimal Sum of Purchasing Cost

An assembly line is made from different machines and a machine can contain different stations and function carriers. Each function carrier even is performed by different standard function carrier variants. The designer can calculate and select the available function carrier variants to construct into a new machine. The advantages of using the available function carriers are the low cost, reduction of design and manufacture time and improvement of machine working life. If a machine has n function carriers, each function carrier contains m variants. Hence, there are n^m combinations to make the machine. The number of these combinations increase rapidly according to a large number of function carriers. To select the suitable function carrier variants subject to optimal cycle time and total purchasing cost, the designer cannot manually select the best solution from so many options. Nowadays, there is no effective method to solve this problem. To solve this problem, this paper will set up the operating cycles for an assembly machine and establish linear optimization in standard form for choosing the best function carrier variants from the given database. To minimize both the cycle time and total purchasing cost of an assembly machine, the linear programming must contain two stages and run in sequence. The large linear optimization is programed and solved by using the IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimizer. The optimal results will be exported to tables in a database. This makes the designer easy evaluate and select the best solution. In addition, designer can expand the scope of study to design other machines.