Balanceamento de uma linha de usinagem de bicos injetores por programação linear inteira mista

Abstract

In a scenario where industries invest millions in reducing the cycle time, line balancing seeks to improve the production line reaching significative improvements without much resources spent. The balancing procedure allows waste reduction, productivity increase, and reducing idleness through workstation's time homogenization. In the mentioned context, the present work applies Operational Research techniques, in particular, Mixed Integer Linear Programming, to obtain optimized balancing responses in a real machining line. This research project consists, initially, on the line understanding; then the workstations were defined in order to better understand the possible line parameters to be considered. With the obtained information it was possible to analyze the cycle time of each workstation and then to use Mathematical Programming to optimize the said context. Two main analyses were performed: the ideal scenario and the implementable scenario. The main performance indicators analyzed were the cycle time, in which the improvement was 12.20%, and the variation between workstation time, that improved 31.05%. Within the implementable scenario, those improvements were obtained with 20 changes in the production line. Although the number of changes seems significant, the total required investment would be only 1,300.00 monetary units ($1,300.00). The payback time for this investment is under 3 hours and the increase in annual production and profit are about 1,4 million products and $4,1 millions, respectively. This implies that, regardless of several adaptations were suggested, they are at a relative small cost and the gains are considerable to the company.