Abstract:Abstract:Research purposes: In order to meet the maintenance requirements of national railway network, the former ministry of railways set up 11 one hundred meters long CWR (Continuous Welded Rail) welding bases national wide. The efficiency of the rail welding assembly line is one of important issues to the manager. In this paper, based on the example of assembly line from rail entrance to “hot-line” in Xiaolizhuang rail welding base of Zhengzhou Railway Bureau,we find that there is a large gap between the actual takt and the original design. Bottleneck effect is obvious. At the same time, in the parallel line of the assembly system, scheduling and coordination will also affect the efficiency of the entire system. Through the methods of survey, modeling and simulation experiments, we evaluate the efficiency of welding assembly line, anlyze bottleneck effect of the parallel line of the assembly system, and then put forward the optimization scheme. Finally we conduct the simulation experiments to analyze the optimized results. Research conclusions: (1) Through investigation, modeling and simulation experiments, we find that the hoisting phase is the outstanding bottleneck of the whole "hot-line" welding assembly line. (2) To eliminate the bottleneck, this paper propose to add one more set of electric hoist on the existing 7 cross beams. (3) After enhancing the efficiency of the hoisting phase, "hot-line" phase becomes the bottleneck. To tackle this problem, the paper proposes to adjust the post-welding check from the high occupied welding platform to low occupied crude grinder platform. (4) Propose to enhance the efficiency of "hot-line" through accelerating the moving speed of hoisting track. (5)The simulation experiment shows the outcome〖HJ〗 is effective, the efficiency rate is increased by 30~40%. (6) The research results can not only be applied on the production capacity expansion of existing CWR welding base but also on the design of new CWR welding base.