Optimum assembly line balancing by minimizing balancing loss and a range based measure for system loss

Abstract

An assembly line is a sequence of workstations, connected together by a material handling system, which is used to assemble components into a final product. The economic importance of assembly as a manufacturing process has led to extensive efforts for designing an assembly line to ensure efficiency and cost effectiveness of assembly operations. These efficiency and effectiveness can be maximized by minimizing balancing loss and system loss. The current work offers a range based measure for System loss and describes a technique for jointly minimizing balancing loss and system loss. To arrive at the optimum solution of the joint minimization problem, the same has been reduced to sequential marginal minimization problems and simulation technique has been installed for obtaining the optimal solution. For demonstration purpose, one example has been worked out to indicate the strength of the suggested method.

Keywords

• Balancing loss
• Idle time
• System loss
• Measure for System loss Slackness