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.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or aerial drones, are an emerging technology with significant market potential. UAVs may lead to substantial cost savings in, for instance, monitoring of difficult-to-access infrastructure, spraying fields and performing surveillance in precision agriculture, as well as in deliveries of packages. In some applications, like disaster management, transport of medical supplies, or environmental monitoring, aerial drones may even help save lives. In this article, we provide a literature survey on optimization approaches to civil applications of UAVs. Our goal is to provide a fast point of entry into the topic for interested researchers and operations planning specialists. We describe the most promising aerial drone applications and outline characteristics of aerial drones relevant to operations planning. In this review of more than 200 articles, we provide insights into widespread and emerging modeling approaches. We conclude by suggesting promising directions for future research.

Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey

A taxonomy of line balancing problems and their solutionapproaches

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ykoren/uploads/Assembly_System_Design_and_Operations.pdf

Assembly system design and operations for product variety

Levelling crane workload in multi-yard rail-road container terminals

In today's mixed-model assembly production, there are two recent trends in particular, namely increasing vertical integration and the proliferation of product variety, which more and more shift focus to an efficient just-in-time part supply. In this context, many automobile manufacturers set up decentralized logistics areas referred to as "supermarkets". Here, small tow trains are loaded with parts and travel across the shop floor on specific routes to make frequent small-lot deliveries which are needed by the stations of the line. This paper investigates the loading problem of clocked tow trains, which aims at minimizing inventory near the line while avoiding material shortages given the limited capacity of tow trains. An exact solution procedure with polynomial runtime is presented and interdependencies with production planning, i.e., the sequencing problem of product models launched down the line, are investigated.

https://www.econbiz.de/archiv1/2010/107174_optimally_loading_clocked.pdf

2009,10: Optimally loading clocked tow trains for JIT-supply of mixed-model assembly lines

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing products among the work stations along the line. On the one hand, research has focussed on developing effective and fast solution methods for exactly solving the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP). On the other hand, a number of real-world extensions of SALBP have been introduced but solved with straight-forward and simple heuristics in many cases. Therefore, there is a lack of procedures for exactly solving such generalized ALBP.In this paper, we show how to extend the well-known solution procedure Salome [Scholl, A., Klein, R., 1997. Salome: A bidirectional branch-and-bound procedure for assembly line balancing. Informs J. Comput. 9 319-334], which is able to solve even large SALBP instances in a very effective manner, to a problem extension with different types of assignment restrictions (called ARALBP). The extended procedure, referred to as Absalom, employs a favorable branching scheme, an arsenal of bounding rules and a variety of logical tests using ideas from constraint programming.Computational experiments show that Absalom is a very promising exact solution approach although the additional assignment restrictions complicate the problem considerably and necessitate a relaxation of some components of Salome.

Absalom: Balancing assembly lines with assignment restrictions

Operational planning at transshipment nodes is a wide and challenging field of research that covers a vast number of distinct relevant applications, spanning from seaport container terminals to rai...

Malte Fliedner

Papers

Levelling crane workload in multi-yard rail-road container terminals

A classification of assembly line balancing problems

2009,10: Optimally loading clocked tow trains for JIT-supply of mixed-model assembly lines

Absalom: Balancing assembly lines with assignment restrictions

Vehicle Sequencing at Transshipment Terminals with Handover Relations