A new model for planning complex assembly lines in support of efficient mass customization

The orientation towards an efficient mass customization confronts most companies with two opposing requirements: While the applied mass production system should be able to produce a huge product variety, the cost must be kept low. Therefore assembly lines have to be planned in a much more flexible way. The inability of traditional models to support efficient mass customization is mainly due to the fact that they define every variant as an individual product. The resulting necessity to record information about all variants for every task leads to an unmanageable amount of data and unrealistic program execution times. In this context, a new problem description is developed which integrates specific complexity management approaches as well as instruments for detailed personnel and process planning. This model has been solved efficiently on a workstation network by using a new distributed tabu search algorithm.