Affiliations: Kadir Has University, Faculty of Engineering,
Department of Industrial Engineering, Cibali Merkez Campus, 34230 Cibali,
Istanbul, Turkey | Istanbul Kültür University, Faculty of
Engineering and Architecture, Department of Industrial Engineering, Atakoy
Campus, D-100 Yanyol, Bakirkoy, Istanbul, Turkey
Abstract: In mass production, assembly-line balancing (ALB) problem has been a
critical and repetitive issue for companies for long time. On the other hand,
equipment selection for stations has also been another important problem at the
design stage of an assembly-line system. In this paper, both problems are
handled simultaneously. Therefore first, goal programming (GP) method, a
well-suited technique is used to develop a preemptive formulation to joint both
of the problems, when the nature of the problem consists of several conflicting
objectives, and some mathematical constraints on solutions. Second, an AHP
method based on fuzzy scales which is incorporated with the GP is also used due
to the fact that it takes both qualitative and quantitative judgments of
decision-maker(s) into consideration to rank the equipment alternatives for
stations by weight. The fuzzy AHP as one of the most commonly used
multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods has been effectively used for
more than decade in both academic research and practice, and takes the
vagueness and uncertainty on judgments of decision-maker(s) into consideration
due to the fact that the crisp pairwise comparison in the conventional AHP
seems to insufficient and imprecise to capture the right judgments of
decision-maker(s). In short, in this study, a combined fuzzy AHP-GP approach is
proposed to evaluating assembly-line design alternatives with equipment
selection. An integer GP formulation is constructed, which also uses the fuzzy
AHP scores of equipment alternatives, and employs them as one of the goals.
Then, the mathematical model is solved to find out the ultimate alternative in
terms of the minimized equipment cost and the maximized preference measures of
decision-maker(s). The proposed approach is also illustrated on a sample case
study.
Keywords: Fuzzy logic, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), goal programming (GP), assembly line design (ALD), assembly-line balancing (ALB)
