The Application And The Research On The Crawler Crane’s Assembly Line Balance

Because the crawler crane is complex, big and heavy, it is assembled atone station usually. But there are many problems of the one station assembly.With the aggravation of the market competition, for improving the efficiencyand decreasing the lead time to enhance the competitiveness, S companydecided to use the assembly line. Assembly line balance is one of the mostimportant problems to high efficiency.First, analyzed the old workshop’s problems, including low efficiency,mass work in process and logistics complex. Measured the task time,removed the unusual data, and ensured the measure times. According to theprecedence diagram for the assembly technics, ensured the goal of theassembly line, designed the genetic algorithm for the crawler crane’sassembly line balance, including encoding, crossover, selection, mutation,fitness function etc.. Optimized the sequence of the tasks assignment, and gotthe numbers of the work stations and the tasks of the stations. Afteroptimizing, assembly ling balance rate of the three branch line were morethan90%.Then, considering assembly task time fluctuating, set up the simulationmodel used the eM-Plant software. Analyzed the load of all the stations, andfound the bottleneck station and the potential bottleneck stations. Used thetask adjusting of the neighborhood difference load to optimize the bottleneckstation and mechanized the potential stations for improving the assembly lingbalance rate, and to ensure the assembly line’s reliability on the condition thattask time fluctuating. When the cycle time of the assembly line was167min,assembly line could produce1011crawler cranes every year, and thereliability achieved97.12%, could reach the require of the900crawler cranesevery year and the reliability95%. The results showed that the way canefficiently solve the crawler crane assembly line balancing problem.