Masters Theses

Abstract

"In the recent years, firms have increasingly automated manufacturing and assembling operations to improve the productivity and reduce human error. But, manual assembly is still used to assemble complex and large scaled systems which require high reliability. With the increasing diversity & demand in customer needs and increased competition, firms are producing larger number of system variants. This trend is leading to one of the current inclination in manual assembly called mixed model assembly operation in which, the variants of the system are manufactured by utilizing the same existing assembly lines. While mixed model assembling operation saves the investing cost of setting up new assembly lines, assembly error may increase due to the higher possibility that the operators interchange the parts between the variants. Design for Assembly (DFA) is a design guideline that assists engineers to design systems that are easier to assemble; however, DFA does not provide any guideline for simultaneously designing variants of system with geometrically similar but functionally different parts being assembled in mixed model operation. This research studied the cognitive effects of non-geometric features, viz., color etc, which are used to distinguish between geometrically similar but functionally different parts. The study is done by conducting assembly experiments. In addition, as assembly productivity and error may be affected by incentive given to the operators, this study also focused on how productivity and error change with different incentive schemes"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Takai, Shun
Du, Xiaoping

Committee Member(s)

Chandrashekhara, K.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Mechanical Engineering

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Fall 2007

Pagination

viii, 40 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 37-39).

Rights

© 2007 Ramaprasad Eshwarahalli Lakshminarayana, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Assembly-line methods -- AutomationConcurrent engineeringEngineering design -- Decision makingIndustrial design

Thesis Number

T 9295

Print OCLC #

270947285

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