ms-05 mba assignment july dec 2010 Question 1

1.      Discuss the Linkage among the volume, variety, Production System and Plant Layout. Elaborate your understanding about assembly line balancing.

Solution:

            Volume is how much three-dimensional space a substance (solid, liquid, gas, or plasma) or shape occupies or contains often quantified numerically using the SI derived unit, the cubic metre. The volume of a container is generally understood to be the capacity of the container, i. e. the amount of fluid (gas or liquid) that the container could hold, rather than the amount of space the container itself displaces. The volume of a solid (whether regularly or irregularly shaped) can be determined by fluid displacement. Displacement of liquid can also be used to determine the volume of a gas. The combined volume of two substances is usually greater than the volume of one of the substances. However, sometimes one substance dissolves in the other and the combined volume is not additive.

            Variety is a weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the Daily Variety Gotham edition, based in New York City was added. All three have been in continual operation since.The magazine is owned by Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, with three print editions and a website. For twenty years its editor-in-chief was Peter Bart, who worked previously at Paramount Pictures and The New York Times. In April 2009, it was announced that Bart was moving to the position of "vice president and editorial director", characterised online as "Boffo No More: Bart Up and Out at Variety". The current editor is Timothy M. Gray

            A production system (or production rule system) is a computer program typically used to provide some form of artificial intelligence, which consists primarily of a set of rules about behavior. These rules, termed productions, are a basic representation found useful in automated planning, expert systems and action selection. A production system provides the mechanism necessary to execute productions in order to achieve some goal for the system. Productions consist of two parts: a sensory precondition (or "IF" statement) and an action (or "THEN"). If a production's precondition matches the current state of the world, then the production is said to be triggered. If a production's action is executed, it is said to have fired. A production system also contains a database, sometimes called working memory, which maintains data about current state or knowledge, and a rule interpreter. The rule interpreter must provide a mechanism for prioritizing productions when more than one is triggered.

            Plant Layout is the economic construction and operation of a process unit will depend on how well the plant equipment specified on the process flow sheet and laid out.

The principal factors to be considered are:

        1. Economic consideration: construction and operation cost.

        2. The process requirement

        3. Convenience of operation

        4. convenience of maintenance

        5. Safety

        6. Future expansion

        7. Modular construction

COSTS:

            The cost of construction can be minimized by adopting a layout that gives shortest run of connecting pipes between equipment, and adopting the least amount of structural steel work. However, this will not necessarily be the best arrangement for operation and maintenance.

PROCESS REQUIREMENT:

            All the required equipments have to be placed properly within process. Even the installation of the auxiliaries should be done in such a way that it will occupy the least space.

OPERATION:

            Equipment that needs to have frequent operation should be locate Convenient to the control room. Valves, sample points, and instruments should be located at convenient position and height. Sufficient working space and headroom must be provided to allow easy access to equipment.

MAINTENANCE:

            Heat exchangers need to be sited so that the tube bundles can be easily withdrawn for cleaning and tube replacement. Vessels that require frequent replacement of catalyst or packing should be located on the outside of buildings. Equipment that requires dismantling for maintenance, such as compressors and large pumps, should be placed under cover.

SAFETY

            Blast walls may be needed to isolate potentially hazardous equipment, and confine the effects of an explosion. At least two escape routes for operator must be provided from each level in the process building

PLANT EXPANSION:

            Equipment should be located so that it can be conveniently tied in with any future expansion of the process. Space should be left on pipe alleys for future needs, service pipes oversized to allow for future requirements.

MODULAR CONSTRUCTION:

            In recent years, there has been a move to assemble sections of the plant at the manufacturer site. These modules will include the equipment, structural steel, piping and instrumentation. The modules then transported to the plant site, by road or sea.

ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING

Line and work cell balancing is an effective tool to improve the through Output of assembly lines and work cells while reducing manpower requirements and costs. Assembly Line Balancing, or simply Line Balancing (LB), is the problem of assigning operations to workstations along an assembly line, in such a way that the assignment be optimal in some sense. Ever since Henry Ford’s introduction of assembly lines, LB has-been an optimization problem of significant industrial importance: the efficiency difference between an optimal and a sub-optimal assignment can yield economies (or waste) reaching millions of dollars per year.

LB is a classic Operations Research (OR) optimization problem, having been tackled by OR over several decades. Many algorithms have been proposed for the problem. Yet despite the practical importance of the problem, and the OR efforts that have been made to tackle it, little commercially available software is available to help industry in optimizing their lines. In fact, according to a recent survey by Becker and Scholl (2004), there appear to be currently just two commercially available packages featuring both a state of the art optimization algorithm and a user-friendly interface for data management. Furthermore, one of those packages appears to handle only the “clean “formulation of the problem (Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem, or SALBP), which leaves only one package available for industries such as automotive. This situation appears to be paradoxical, or at least unexpected: given the huge economies LB can generate, one would expect several software packages vying to grab a part of those economies.

It appears that the gap between the available OR results and their dissemination in today’s industry, is probably due to a misalignment between the academic LB problem addressed by most of the OR approaches, and the actual problem being faced by the industry. LB is a difficult optimization problem (even its simplest forms are NP-hard –see Garey and Johnson, 1979), so the approach taken by OR has typically been to simplify it, in order to bring it to a level of complexity amenable to OR tools. While this is a perfectly valid approach in general, in the particular case of LB it led to some definitions of the problem that ignore many aspects of the real-world problem. Unfortunately, many of the aspects that have been left out in the OR approach are in fact crucial to industries such as automotive, in the sense that any solution ignoring (violating)those aspects becomes unusable in the industry.