New Trends and Challenges in Transfer Line Balancing
Résumé
Transfer lines have evolved with advanced technology, requirements and challenges imposed by the economic globalization. For mass production with fixed and known demand, manufacturers used to develop Dedicated Transfer Lines (DTL). For varied demand, the proposed solution consists to Flexible Transfer Lines (FTL). Flexible transfer lines (FTL) have then been proposed to permit a customized product. However, FTL have quickly appeared deceiving and expensive facing to large variations or uncertainty of the demand. In this case, FTL can become obsolete. Reconfigurable Transfer Lines (RTL) have been proposed as a response to these disadvantages. Some authors judge them more flexible than the FTLs because they allow hardware reconfiguration in addition to software reconfiguration of FTL.