Investigation of RFID-enabled walking-worker assembly islands with fixed-position layouts

Abstract

This research investigates a metallurgy manufacturer whose products are assembled on fixed position assembly islands. The products of collaborating company are characterized by large-scale with high complexity and mass customization. With such configuration, a product is always set on one location throughout its whole assembly cycle. Assembly materials, machines and operators can be continuity sent to one location to reduce damage or movement cost. To understand the production challenges of a real-life enterprise, this research investigates production procedures of the collaborating enterprise on planning, scheduling, logistics and assembly. The management challenges of assembly method with fixed-position layout are summarized as: (1) High dynamic of material, tools and operator movement. (2) The movement of operators, assembly machines maybe expensive. (3) The requirements of assembly operators are too high to find suitable operators with low cost. The cause of current production problems of the collaborating enterprise are summarized as: (1) lack of appropriate real-time operation data capturing and collection methods (2) current visibility and traceability functions at shop floor is wasteful, time consuming and inaccuracy (3) production data can hardly be synchronized between different production unites, e.g. assembly island buffers and stock areas. Hence RFID technology is applied to solve the problems.

The creation of RFID-enable assembly environment is following the AUTOM RFID implementation solutions. The methodology of deployment RFID hardware facilities and the functions of choosing production object to tag RFID tags, finding value-adding points to deploy RFID readers and building networks to integrate the RFID hardware facilities are introduced.

Decision support system is developed to connect and transfer information between shop-floor execution and decision. This system guides executions and collects real-time information involved in execution procedures and converts the information as reference for decision makers. This system can also release shop-floor decisions instantly to operators. Four core components including Explorers, Modules, Services and Data repository compose the framework. These four components interrelates to each other to guarantee the smooth shop-floor information transformation.

Finally, a case study demonstrates the RFID solution has been successfully deployed in proof-of-concept shop floor of the collaborating enterprise. The decision support system can proper manage the captured real-time information and convert the information into useful reference data for decision makers. As the operation processes of this case is designed strictly following the real-life operation processes, therefore this RFID solution is capable to be applied in real-life shop floor to assist the enterprise operation and management.