Sales Kit Automated Production: An Integrated Procedure for Setup Reduction in Case of High Products Variety

Nowadays, the demand for personalized goods is increasing, with small batches of customized products. Companies are asked to cope with this need to be more competitive; thus, it is crucial to optimally set up the production process to cope with the demand. Among the products composed of several parts, sales kits occupy a significant role. Sales kits are sets of different components, supplied as a single unit. Automation is usually used to reduce the unit direct production costs for assembled products, and this is especially true for kitting since it has minimum added value, compared to other technologies. The wide range of components leads to frequent reconfiguration of the feeding devices between different products, increasing the setup time. The aim of this work is to provide a model that minimizes the setup times of automatic kitting systems when working with a high variety of products. To reach this goal, we propose to apply the traveling salesman problem (TSP) to the production process by integrating a multi-clustering model, thus increasing its appeal to several applications. This method is applied both to simulations and to a real case study, and proves to be able to provide a good solution in a reasonable time.