A Mathematical Model for Line-Seru Conversion and Scheduling Problem in Seru Production System

Abstract

In today's competitive environment, businesses need to respond quickly and with high efficiency to the diverse and personal demands of customers in order to increase their competitiveness. In order to increase efficiency and flexibility in production systems, different production systems such as mass production (assembly line) produced by the American Ford company, Toyota Production System (TPS) developed by Toyota in Japan and cellular production system (CM) based on group technology (GT) have been developed. However, productivity is dropped in the assembly line and Toyota production system due to dynamic demands, short life cycle of products and high diversity. Japanese companies such as Sony and Canon have developed a Japanese cellular manufacturing system to meet market demands and to distinguish it from the traditional CM, they have called this production system a seru production system. There have been few studies in the literature on the seru production system. Especially in the Turkish literature, there are only two studies that considered seru production systems. With this aspect, this study is aimed to fill this gap in the literature. In this study, a comprehensive literature review has been conducted. In addition, a mathematical model is proposed for the conversion of the assembly line to the seru production system (line-seru conversion) and scheduling problems that minimize total tardiness. The GAMS package program is used to solve the model and the results are analyzed.