Research On Optimization And Simulation Model Of Custom Furniture Sorting Process Based On Production Line Balance

The key to flexible manufacturing of custom furniture is the change of manufacturing method,in which the process is to disassemble the ordered furniture products into various types of panels and transform the production of furniture products into panel production.The sorting process,as an important part of the kneading order production,needs to reassemble the pre-mixed production of panels according to the order.With the increasing demand for personalization,the number of panels,finishes,material types and sizes in the production of custom furniture is increasing and updated frequently,resulting in low operational efficiency,high error rates and increased management difficulties in the sorting process.Based on this,this paper combines literature research,data analysis,case summaries and virtual simulation validation based on the research of 10 custom furniture companies to study the sorting system of S Custom Furniture Company as a specific case study.In order to address the adaptation problems of the initial automated sorting system in terms of line structure,access mode,equipment configuration and control system,an estimation method of equipment configuration was used to optimize the equipment production line,control logic and basic architecture of the sorting system,and simulation software was used to construct a simulation model of the automated sorting system to verify the optimized sorting scheme.The research results are as follows:(1)By investigating the key processes in the production line of a custom furniture company,it was concluded that the sorting process is the bottleneck process that affects the balance of the production line.Taking the operation of the picking process equipment system of S Custom Furniture Company as an example,through the data statistics,it was concluded that the low efficiency of the picking process was the main factor leading to the imbalance of the production line,and combined with OEE theory and correlation analysis tools to analyze the factors affecting the efficiency in the picking process,it was concluded that the equipment in the picking process had problems such as unreasonable inlet and outlet control logic and line mismatch of the picking system.(2)The hardware equipment configuration required for the sorting system was evaluated using an estimation method by combining information on shop floor capacity,equipment parameters,and sorting requirements,including: sensor type,line structure,number of robots,and vertical storage unit planning.(3)Based on the control logic and basic architecture between the sorting equipment and the control management system,the information flow and interaction processes in the transport,inbound,storage allocation,outbound and collaborative work of the picking system are constructed.A detailed picking process layout plan is also proposed based on the planning layout,resource allocation and control logic of the production line.(4)Simulation software was used to build the corresponding sorting system equipment model,and the operation process of the sorting system equipment model was integrated.designed the control scheme of the equipment in the virtual simulation model,and the simulation operation of the automatic sorting production process was realized according to the scheme.(5)The data from the preliminary research were imported into the developed virtual simulation model for validation,and the production data before and after the optimization of picking quantity,production speed and clearance time were compared under the same conditions.The results show that the design of the picking system in this study improves the inbound and outbound board throughput by 92.11% and 52.84%,respectively,increases the production speed by 34.9% and 38.8%,and reduces the gap time by 98.58% and 7.96%,respectively,and increases the line balance rate from 65.9% to 87.6%.