Abstract
Abstract
Assembly line balancing (ALB) is an important aspect in the design of many flow line type manufacturing systems which may or may not be assembly oriented. It involves essentially assigning individual tasks into stations such that certain constraints are satisfied and some specified objectives achieved. Although this problem has attracted a great deal of research effort over the past forty years, it still remains unsolved. This paper presents a computer-based method for the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP). For a given problem, the method makes use of some efficient and systematic search and identification techniques to establish task trees for individual stations and to develop a station tree for multiple solutions. Different from all known existing assembly line balancing methods, this method aims at finding the best possible solutions that lead to the maximum production rate and the minimum station workload variation. The essential and distinct concepts adopted by the method are described in this paper, along with its step-by-step execution procedure and an illustrative example. Since the method does not involve difficult mathematics, many industrial practitioners can easily understand it and appreciate its effectiveness.