Jury :

• Pierre CASTAGNA, Professeur à l'Université de Nantes, Rapporteur
• Yannick FREIN, Professeur à l'INP de Grenoble, Rapporteur
• Nabil ANWER, Maître de conférences, HDR, à l'universté de Paris-Saclay, Examinateur
• Olga BATTAIA, Professeur à l'ISAE de Toulouse, Examinatrice
• Emmanuel Caillaud, Professeur à l'université de Strasbourg, Examinateur
• Luc MATHIEU, Professeur à l'Université de Paris-Sud, Directeur de thèse
• Marc ALOCHET, Expert leader à RENAULT SA, Invité
• Stéphane POIS, Expert à RENAULT SA, Invité

Keywords : Automotive assembly lines, Variety management, Efficiency, Flexibility, Convertibility.

Abstract :
In a highly competitive and uncertain environment, the automotive industry is facing new challenges to meet customer requirements that are constantly changing. Mass customization caused that product variety increased drastically and consequently, tested the capacity of the existing production systems to cope with this new situation. Convertibility is the ability of the assembly system to cope with product variety with minimum cost. This thesis analyzes the definition and dimensions of convertibility and investigates the change drivers that make convertibility important for the case of automotive assembly lines.
Based on industrial practices, a new concept is developed, named AutoConvert, regarding the automotive assembly line convertibility. It analyzes the impact of the introduction of a new variant on the three main elements which compose an assembly system, namely Products, Processes and Resources. Then, three technological indicators? are built to quantify assembly line convertibility and provide both assembly line and product designers? with efficient decision-making support tools to support their orientations and choices. A cost study is also conducted in order to complete and consolidate the technological indicators. The relevance of the approach is experimented in real cases from the automotive industry.