In this paper we study an assembly line balancing problem that occurs in sheltered worker centers for the disabled, where workers with very different characteristics are present. We are interested in the situation in which complete parallel assembly lines are allowed and name the resulting problem as parallel assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem (PALWABP). This approach enables...

Assembly line production is one of the widely used production systems. The problem of Assembly Line Balancing deals with the distribution of activities among the workstations which lead to the maximum utilization of Human Resources and facilities without disturbing the work sequence. The problem is motivated by a vehicle-sequencing problem at an Automobile company, Gurugram. A new Heuristic Met...

This paper proposed a parallel automated assembly line system to produce multiple products having multiple autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs). Several assembly lines are configured to produce multiple products in which the technologies of machines are shared among the assembly lines when required. The transportation between the stations in an assembly line (intra assembly line) and among station...

In this article, we introduce two new variants of the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem that allow parallelization of and collaboration between heterogeneous workers. These new line balancing approaches introduce an additional level of flexibility in the assignment and planning process, which may be particularly useful in practical situations where the aim is to progressivel...

Although the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP) is the topic of many studies, typically they either consider minimizing the number of stations for a given cycle time (called type one), or minimizing the cycle time for a given number of stations (called type two). Rarely, type E of the problem has been considered. In the type E, cycle time and number of stations are both decision var...

Assembly line balancing is a classic ill-structured problem where total enumeration is infeasible and optimal solutions uncertain for industrial problems. A quantitative approach to classifying problem difficulty and solution quality is therefore important. Two existing measures of difficulty, Order Strength and West Ratio are compared to a new compound expression of difficulty, Project Index. ...

In production systems of automobile manufacturers multi-variant products are assembled on paced mixed-model assembly lines, which have to be supplied by a lean in-house logistic with containers of different sizes, alternative supply policies and different number of parts. The assignment of operations to workplaces within the assembly line balancing problem and the assignment of containers to su...

Assembly line balancing is a very important issue in mass production systems due to production cost. Although many studies have been done on this topic, but because assembly line balancing problems are so complex they are categorized as NP-hard problems and researchers strongly recommend using heuristic methods. This paper presents a new heuristic approach called the critical task method (CTM) ...

Assembly lines are special flow-lines production systems which are typical in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities. Assembly line balancing is based on evenly distribution of operations between workstations so that each idle time of the machines was minimal. It is assumed that operation times on the machines and the precedence relationship existing between the ope...