Assembly lines are flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities and more recently even gained importance in low volume production of customized products. Due to high capital requirements when installing or redesigning a line, configuration planning is of great relevance for practitioners. Accordingly, this attr...

Mixed-model assembly line (MMAL) is a type of production line where a variety of product models similar to product characteristics are assembled. Line balancing and model sequencing problems are important for an efficient use of such lines. This paper presents integer programming formulation and a solution for a loading and assembly plan selection problem in a mixed-model assembly system. The p...

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. ...

Assembly line balancing has been a focus of interest to academics in operation management for the last decades. Despite diverse research works in this field, many problems still remained unsolved. Given the importance and attractiveness of the mixed product parallel lines balancing problem and the importance of the human factor in the development process and also very few studies in relation to...

In this paper, we present an extension to the TSALB problem (Time and Space constrained Assembly Line Balancing) with ergonomic risk restrictions. This ergonomic risk is defined from the task durations and their categories regarding to the risk factor for the workers. A study is presented through a case linked to an engine assembly line in the Automobile industry, considering variable demand.

The General Assembly Line Balancing Problem with Setups (GALBPS) was recently defined in the literature. It adds sequence-dependent setup time considerations to the classical Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP) as follows: whenever a task is assigned next to another at the same workstation, a setup time must be added to compute the global workstation time, thereby providing the task ...

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...

Use of interpretative structural modeling (ISM) is inspired by the versatility displayed by this method, as reported by researchers, across a wide spectrum of economic and competitive complexities affecting businesses. The aim of this paper is to develop and analyze the relationship among the identified various functional /technical objectives (criteria's) of assembly line balancing proble...

This paper presents an approach, based on ant techniques, to effectively address the assembly line balancing problem with the complicating factors of parallel workstations, stochastic task durations, and mixed-models. A methodology was inspired by the behavior of social insects in an attempt to distribute tasks among workers so that strategic performance measures are optimized. This methodology...

Worker assignment is a new type of problem in assembly line balancing problems, which typically occurs in sheltered work centers for the disabled. However, only a few contributions consider worker assignment in a two-sided assembly line. This research presents three variants of artificial bee colony algorithm to solve worker assignment and line balancing in two-sided assembly lines. The utiliza...