Improving performance of a station and smoothing the exit rate in an assembly line

Assembly line is the most well-known mass production system which was first used by Henry Ford in automobile industries. Malfunction of a station will have an impact on the whole assembly line. Having a great impact on the performance of the whole assembly line, interaction of the stations on each other should be considered precisely. In this paper we will use discrete event simulation to improve performance of a station and the whole assembly line by smoothing the exit rate, which is the entrance rate to the next station. At the end of this article, the results for a case problem are illustrated and several conclusions are driven.