Operations sequencing in a cable assembly shop

Abstract

The need for a better, compact and neat solution in the cable systems used by the automotive industry resulted in emerge of companies specialized in producing such cable systems. The present study is an extension of the work that was carried out for one such company. One of the main operations in the production of cable systems is the attachment of the connectors to the ends of the cables. This process is composed of cutting, stripping and crimping the cable ends. These operations are to be performed for each connecter attachment. Each connector type requires a different head for the crimping operation. Thus, the required setup time is doubled if the heads for both ends of the cable should be changed. The problem in hand is a TSP where the distances between the nodes are either one or two. An effective and simple heuristic algorithm is developed that yields either an optimum solution or one that is off by a few percent. Among nine experiments six resulted with optimum solution while the others deviated from the optimum at most one percent.