The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines

Unbalanced assembly line research has grown in importance because of its increasing applications emerging economies, reverse logistics and remanufacturing. This paper examines the performance numerous simulated patterns for reliable unbalanced manual merging lines. The contribution this study to literature is that imbalance does not always negatively impact efficiency it can improve when compared a corresponding balanced line. best was found be configuration monotone decreasing order both parallel lines, with former generally resulting lower throughput latter average buffer level than