Multi-plant assembly planning models for a collaborative manufacturing environment

In a global supply chain, the components or parts of a product may be distributed and produced at various plants in a collaborative way for the purpose of expanding capacity and reducing costs. For an assembled product, the assembly operations for assembling the product may be performed at different assembly plants at various geographical locations. Therefore, in this collaborative manufacturing environment, it is required that one develops a multi-plant assembly planning model for organizing and distributing the assembly operations to the suitable plants for completing the final product. In this research, a multi-plant assembly planning model for generating and evaluating the multi-plant assembly sequences is presented. New graph-based models are developed to model and generate the assembly sequences. The feasible assembly sequences are analysed and evaluated based on several cost objectives. The multi-plant assembly planning model is formulated with the aim of minimizing the total of assembly costs and multi-plant costs. As a result, the optimized multi-plant assembly sequences can be obtained and each of the assembly operations is assigned to the suitable plant with a minimized cost. Example parts are tested and discussed.