State-of-the-art exact and heuristic solution procedures for simple assembly line balancing

A classification of assembly line balancing problems

Assembly lines are special flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the indus-trial production of high quantity standardized commodities. Recently, assembly lines even gained importance in low volume production of customized products (mass-customization). Due to high capital requirements when installing or redesigning a line, its configuration planning is of great rele-vance for practitioners. Accordingly, this attracted attention of plenty researchers, who tried to sup-port real-world configuration planning by suited optimization models (assembly line balancing prob-lems). In spite of the enormous academic effort in assembly line balancing, there remains a consider-able gap between requirements of real configuration problems and the status of research. To ease communication between researchers and practitioners, we provide a classification scheme of assem-bly line balancing. This is a valuable step in identifying remaining research challenges which might contribute to closing the gap.

A taxonomy of line balancing problems and their solutionapproaches

https://www.econbiz.de/archiv1/2010/107672_sequencing_mixed_model.pdf

Sequencing mixed-model assembly lines: Survey, classification and model critique

A survey on problems and methods in generalized assembly line balancing

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) arise whenever an assembly line is con- figured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manu- facturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the work stations along the line sub- ject to a strict or average cycle time. Traditionally, stations are considered to be manned by one operator, respectively, or duplicated in form of identical parallel stations, each also manned by a single operator. In practice, this assumption is usually too restrictive. This is particularly true for large products like cars, trucks, busses and machines, which can be handled by several op- erators performing different tasks at the same time. Only restricted research has been done on such parallel workplaces within the same station though they have significant relevance in real- world assembly line settings. In this paper, we consider an extension of the basic ALBP to the case of flexible parallel work- places (VWALBP) as they typically occur in the automobile and other industries assembling large products. The problem is defined and modelled as an integer linear program. As a solution approach a branch-and-bound procedure is proposed which also can be applied as a heuristic. Finally, computational experiments documenting the solution capabilities of the procedure are reported.

Christian Becker

Papers

A survey on problems and methods in generalized assembly line balancing

2008,6: Balancing assembly lines with variable parallel workplaces : problem definition, model and exact solution procedure