Studying unbalanced workload and buffer allocation of production systems using multi-objective optimisation
该研究提出一种基于多目标优化的新方法，用于分析非同步生产线上服务时间不平衡和缓冲区大小对系统效率的影响，发现不同不平衡模式在不同性能指标上各有优势。
Numerous studies have investigated the effects of unbalanced service times and inter-station buffer sizes on the efficiency of discrete part, unpaced production lines. There are two main disadvantages of many of these studies: (1) only some predetermined degree of imbalance and patterns of imbalance have been evaluated against the perfectly balanced configuration, making it hard to form a general conclusion on these factors; (2) only a single objective has been set as the target, which neglects the fact that different patterns of imbalance may outperform with respect to different performance measures. Therefore, the aim of this study is to introduce a new approach to investigate the performance of unpaced production lines by using multiple-objective optimisation. It has been found by equipping multi-objective optimisation with an efficient, equality constraints handling technique, both the optimal pattern and degree of imbalance, as well as the optimal relationship among these factors and the performance measures of a production system can be sought and analysed with some single optimisation runs. The results have illustrated that some very interesting relationships among the key performance measures studied, including system throughput, work-in-process and average buffer level, could only be observed within a truly multi-objective optimisation context. While these results may not be generalised to apply to any production lines, the genericity of the proposed simulation-based approach is believed to be applicable to study any real-world, complex production lines.