Abstract: An investigation on the window lifter production line of an auto electronic factory shows that the final inspection process is the bottleneck of the production line. The cause is that it takes too long time for the EOL testing instrument to perform inspection. In this paper, the final inspection process is treated as a twostage serial system with a single queue, single machine set, and work piece arriving in batches. Hereby, activity cycle diagram is applied to establish the corresponding production system model. Based on the model, simulation is carried out to analyze performance indexes, such as circle time, changes of work in process, EOL waiting time, and MC and EOL equipment utility rate. Then, improvement solution is presented. By doing so, the circle time is shortened from 10.4 s to 9.4 s, and EOL equipment utilization rate is increased from 88.6% to 90.1%.

Key words: production line, modeling, simulation