Product Grouping and Resource Allocation in Multiline Manufacturing Systems

This paper studies the product grouping problem and the resource allocation problem in the design of manufacturing systems where multiple production lines are used to manufacture a range of products. Each production line in the product grouping problem is dedicated to manufacturing a group of products. A mathematical model is developed to determine the number of product groups and the composition of each product group in the manufacturing system. For the resource allocation problem, a mathematical model is developed to determine the optimal resource allocation scheme for each production line and the optimal inventory level for each product. A genetic-based algorithm is proposed to solve the product grouping problem and the resource allocation problem simultaneously, and its results are compared to those of the conventional heuristic approaches. The proposed genetic approach is a simple but effective means of solving these problems.