An integrated simulation-data envelopment analysis approach for impact of line-seru conversion

This study aims to design an innovative method to evaluate the effects of line-seru conversion in terms of various environmental and economic performance criteria. For this purpose, an integrated approach using simulation and data envelopment analysis (DEA) assisted with various performance criteria is proposed for the first time. The simulation studies involve diverse scenarios for the production of a circuit breaker on assembly lines balanced with RPW and COMSOAL heuristic algorithms, and seru production systems. The simulation results indicate a significant increase in labour effectiveness and station/yatai utilization ratios, complete removal of WIP inventories, which led to a growth in productivity up to 43.29%. The number of workers, carbon-dioxide emission, required workspace, training costs of workers and equipment cost data were incorporated in the results to evaluate the applicability and relative efficiency of the developed scenarios by use of the CCR and BCC models of DEA. The calculated scale efficiency shows that the scenarios for assembly lines balanced with COMSOAL and the seru-based scenarios were both fully effective. The seru production system scenario with 6 yatais was the most effective scenario due to reduced task times after conversion. Also, line-seru conversion proved to be advantageous despite the high training costs.