Received: 16 November 2014 Abstract Accepted: 11 January 2015 In this paper, an Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) is presented in a real-world automotive cables manufacturer company. This company found it necessary to balance its line, since it needs to increase the production rate. In this ALBP, the number of stations is known and the objective is to minimize cycle time where both precede...

Products such as cars, trucks, and heavy machinery are assembled by two-sided assembly line. Assembly line balancing has significant impacts on the performance and productivity of flow line manufacturing systems and is an active research area for several decades. This paper addresses the line balancing problem of a two-sided assembly line in which the tasks are to be assigned at L side or R sid...

Assembly lines are manufacturing systems in which a product is assembled progressively in workstations by different workers or machines, each executing a subset of the needed assembly operations (or tasks). We consider the case in which task execution times are worker-dependent and uncertain, being expressed as intervals of possible values. Our goal is to find an assignment of tasks and workers...

The manufacturing assembly line was first introduced by Henry Ford in the early 1900’s. It was designed to be an efficient, highly productive way of manufacturing a particular product. The basic assembly line consists of a set of workstations arranged in a linear fashion, with each station connected by a material handling device. The basic movement of material through an assembly line begins wi...

This paper address a special class of generalized assembly line balancing in which it is assumed that there are two groups of workers: skilled and unskilled ones. The skilled workers are hired permanently while the unskilled ones can be hired temporarily in order to meet the seasonal demands. It is also assumed that more than one worker may be assigned to each workstation. To show the adv...

In this paper an event and object oriented simulator for assembly lines is presented. The tool, developed in Java, is capable to simulate mixed model assembly lines, with stochastic task times, parallel stations, fixed scheduling sequences, and buffers within workstations. The simulator is a flexible supporting tool in finding solution of the mixed model assembly line balancing problem (and the...

Mixed-model assembly lines are increasingly accepted in many industrial environments to meet the growing trend of greater product variability, diversification of customer demands, and shorter life cycles. In this research, a new mathematical model is presented considering balancing a mixed-model U-line and human-related issues, simultaneously. The objective function consists of two separate com...