Energy-efficient supplying strategies in assembly lines

National audienceThis paper focusses on the problem of supplying the workstations of assembly lines with components during the production process. The components are assumed to be packed in pallets (or boxes). The pallets are shipped from a co-called supermarket and delivered to the workstations using tow trains with wagons. For each time period, depending on the production plan, a workstation has its specific component demand expressed as a fraction of pallets. The problem is to define the sequence of workstations that have to be visited by the tow train at each time period, as well as the number of pallets delivered at each stop. For that specific problem, this paper presents a Mixed Integer Linear Program that aims at minimizing the energy consumption of the supplying strategy. We particularly discuss which are the most significant energy parameters for that problem and how they can be explicitly modelled into the MILP. We also provide computational experiments and discuss the limitation of the approach