INTERACTIVE TOOL FOR AN OPTIMAL EQUIPMENT SELECTION

This paper presents an interactive tool for equipment selection in an assembly line and its link with a Resource Planner which will optimize the cost and reliability of the line by choosing the best equipment combination on each workstation.

After a brief survey of works related to ours in the field of Resource Planning we will describe the software package (named SELEQ) implementing the first step in our Resource Planning tool: equipment selection. The selection process is divided in two parts: the choice of the assembly method and interactive search in an equipment database.

Thanks to the use of the Resource Planning tool based on Grouping Genetic Algorithms, the method presented here has the advantage of allowing a real global optimization of the fine without excessive simplifications of the design problem because of important computational times due to the combinatorial nature of the problem.