Line Balancing and Sequencing for Peak Power Minimization

Abstract : In the past years, environmental awareness started to bring new production paradigms based on energy efficiency. If it is possible to improve energy efficiency of existing production systems, it should be even more profitable to consider this objective at the design stage. In the context of Paced Production Lines, and given power requirements for operations, it becomes possible to assign more efficiently these operations to stations while respecting other constraints such as maximum takt time and number of workstations. The repetitive nature of paced lines implies that misconceptions implying a high peak power consumption will see this peak power repeated over and over without having large possibilities to correct it. In order to tackle peak power minimization objectives, this implies to consider sequencing of operations in addition to their assignment to workstation which is not classical in line balancing. In this paper, the problem under study is presented with a new specific feature that allows to consider semi-active sequence of operations at each station. In order to address large scale instances, a first metaheuristic approach is implemented and evaluated on an extended dataset from the literature. Results show that it is possible to improve energy efficiency at the design stage of production systems.