Otimização do sequenciamento de operadores a múltiplos postos de trabalho em processo de usinagem de componentes mecânicos

Abstract

The present work addresses the activity sequencing problem for machine operators working in the machining of mechanical parts at a company in the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba city. The operators work at different workplaces; thus, they navigate the shop floor to engage in the manual operations demanded by each machine. Thereby, sequencing the operators’ attendance to the workplaces is essential to avoid, for instance, the idleness of machines waiting for the worker for an extended period of time without, in fact, processing any material or, in other words, without effective value aggregation. In the analyzed industrial context, there is already a displacement sequence for the workers determined by practical experience, which has no guarantees of being the best solution, e.g., for maximizing the line productivity. In order to quantitatively evaluate the given context, this work intends to present a discrete-event simulation model implemented in the Tecnomatix Plant Simulation environment, which has native support for optimization via Genetic Algorithms (GA). The results allowed us to observe that, for the evaluated case, there is a possibility of an increase of approximately 5% of the line production just by rationalizing the displacements of the operators, avoiding machines’ blockage.