Beixin Xia

Shanghai University | SHU

With the increase in product varieties, the combination of supermarkets and tow trains is being adopted by more automobile manufacturers for part feeding, especially in mixed-flow assembly lines. This paper focuses on the routing, scheduling, and loading problems of a single towed train that transports parts from one supermarket to the workstation...

To tackle the balancing and sequencing problems of flexible mixed model assembly lines with alternative precedence relations, If–then rules and AND/OR graphs are adopted as modelling tools to replace precedence graphs that have limitations in representing alternative precedence relations. Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) and constraint progr...

Crack is the most common defect in the railway sleeper inspection work. However, it is still lack of effective algorithms to automatically detect. Two deep learning based methods were popularly used to detect cracks: two-stage methods and one-stage methods. However, they both have their corresponding shortcomings: for the two-stage methods, they ar...

In order to solve the problem of vehicle scheduling to feed parts at automobile assembly line, this study proposes a just-in-time delivery method combined with the mode of material supermarket. A mixed integer linear programming model with the primary objective of using the least number of tow trains is constructed by considering capacity of vehicl...

Conventional multivariate control charts usually focus on a specific process shifts range (small or large), and they cannot get the knowledge of manufacturing process through the learning of in-control data and be effective over the whole range of mean shifts, due to the characteristics of their own structures. In this paper, an effective combined...

This paper presents a new analytical approach to the analysis of transfer lines with unreliable machines and unreliable buffers running in a steady state. The buffers are assumed to be subject to time-dependent failure, i.e. they can fail in any condition, even when not loaded. As the most common representative of this type of buffer, accumulating...

Climate change pushes the operation managers to take account of energy-saving issues in their decision-making of production scheduling and maintenance planning (PSMP). We address a PSMP problem for a single machine system under Time-of-Use electricity tariff. We consider two objectives including the makespan that measures the service level and the...

Manufacturers tend to bundle a product with its related services as a product service system (PSS), to create more values for customers and gain competitive advantages for themselves. Configuration design is the key process of PSS development. Configuring a PSS involves selecting and combining appropriate product and service components, to satisfy...

Special vehicles named flat transporters are used to deliver heavy ship assembly blocks in shipyards. Because each movement of assembly blocks among workshops needs transporters and the transportations are time-consuming, the scheduling of transporters is important for maintaining the overall production schedule of assembly blocks. This paper consi...

In a multivariate manufacturing process, there are two or more correlated quality characteristics which are needed to monitor and control simultaneously and hence various multivariate control charts are applied to determine whether a process is in-control. Once a control chart gives an alarm, the next work is to determine source(s) of the out-of-co...

This paper deals with stochastic dynamic facility layout problem under demand uncertainty in terms of material flow between facilities. A robust approach suggests a robust layout in each period as the most frequent one falling within a prespecified percentage of the optimal solution for multiple scenarios. Mont Carlo simulation method is used to ra...

Conventional multivariate cumulative sum control charts are more sensitive to small shifts than T2 control charts, but they cannot get the knowledge of manufacturing process through the learning of in-control data due to the characteristics of their own structures. To address this issue, a modified multivariate cumulative sum control chart based on...

This article presents an omnidirectional mobile platform with six mecanum wheels, which provide better carrying capacity than traditional four-wheel platform. Omnidirectional mobile platform with six mecanum wheels can withstand heavier load than the omnidirectional mobile platform with four mecanum wheels, which was used to transport large equipme...

This paper studies the problem of scheduling a multiple-load carrier which is used to deliver parts to line-side buffers of a general assembly (GA) line. In order to maximize the reward of the GA line, both the throughput of the GA line and the material handling distance are considered as scheduling criteria. After formulating the scheduling proble...

This paper presents an efficient exact analytical method for evaluating the performance of a two-machine manufacturing system with a finite buffer. Unlike existing work, it is assumed that the buffer is prone to time-dependent failure, that is, failure that can occur even when the buffer is not working. First, Markov model is established for the sy...

This paper presents a new approximate analytical method for the performance evaluation of inhomogeneous assembly/disassembly (A/D) systems with machines subject to failures and finite buffers. Processing times of machines in these systems are deterministic but not identical. Times between failures and times to repair are both assumed to be exponent...

Buffers are widely adopted in transfer lines to reduce the fluctuations caused by the imbalances of systems or machine failures. This paper presents an efficient analytical method to evaluate the performance of transfer lines with unreliable machines and finite transfer-delay buffers. Firstly, the buffers with transfer delays are transformed equiva...

In this paper, we consider transfer lines consisting of a series of machines separated by finite buffers. The processing time of each machine is deterministic and may be not identical. All machines are prone to operation-dependent failures, and the times between failures and the times to repair are assumed to be exponentially distributed. Many anal...