Track: Master Thesis Competition

Abstract

With the ever-increasing levels of market competition, companies are continuously forced to innovate and enhance their product development to increase their performance and stay relevant in the market. In this scenario, manufacturing companies must react to this increase in production rhythm by correctly planning and constantly improving the production lines implemented on the shop floor. Additionally, to meet the customers’ requirements, it is needed to produce new and quality products at reduced prices. To achieve this, lead times must be reduced, and production lines must become increasingly efficient. The Facility Layout Problem has a significant impact in several important aspects, such as manufacturing costs, work in progress, lead times, and productivity. When adding new production lines, manufacturing companies must do a more in-depth study on how to make this addition without having a negative impact on the efficiency of the already existing production lines and on production costs. In this work, a company that needed to restructure its shop floor to insert a new production line for a new product is portrait. To perceive the impact of this change, three different case studies were analyzed, and layouts were developed for three production lines applying different line balancing techniques and layout development techniques.