A mass-flow MILP formulation for energy-efficient supplying in assembly lines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a MILP model for assembly line supply that minimizes energy use by optimizing mass flow routing between workstations, offering a more comprehensive approach than traditional flow-only models.

Contribution

It presents a novel MILP formulation that incorporates mass flow routing to improve energy efficiency in assembly line supplying strategies.

Findings

The model effectively reduces energy consumption in simulated scenarios.

Mass flow routing provides significant improvements over traditional flow-only methods.

The approach is adaptable to different assembly line configurations.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of supplying the workstations of assembly lines with components during the production process. For that specific problem, this paper presents a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) that aims at minimizing the energy consumption of the supplying strategy. More specifically, in contrast of the usual formulations that only consider component flows, this MILP handles the mass flow that are routed from one workstation to the other.