Absalom: Balancing assembly lines with assignment restrictions

Abstract

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 straightforward 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 (INFORMS J. Computing 9,(319)(320)(321)(322)(323)(324)(325)(326)(327)(328)(329)(330)(331)(332)(333)(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 AR-ALBP). The extended procedure is given the acronym ABSALOM. It consists of a favourable 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 though the additional assignment restrictions complicate the problem and require some components of SALOME to be modified in a relaxing manner.

The assembly line balancing and scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times: problem extension, model formulation and efficient heuristics

“…Former research considers setup considerations only indirectly via assignment restrictions (e.g., Boysen et al, 2007;Scholl et al, 2010) along the following reasoning: If setup times are known to be (too) large, planners might take this into account by setting the related tasks incompatible, i.e., they are not allowed to be assigned to the same station (e.g., Becker and Scholl, 2009). Nevertheless, it is not possible to model any setup time by an assignment restriction, because this would be too restrictive and reduce the degree of freedom in using capacities unnecessarily.…”

“…Task-GRASP (called TG) of Andrés et al (2008), described in Section 4.2, is restricted to 10 passes as suggested by the authors, while Avalanche (see Section 4.3) is restricted to 1000 iterations with a population size of 25 sequence vectors (ants) as proposed in Scholl et al (2010). As the MP-rule of Martino and Pastor (2009) is a single-pass rule, it constructs a single solution (first step called MP) which is improved by local search after each assignment (both steps called MPLS) as described in Section 4.1.…”

Incorporating Ergonomics Factors into the TSALBP

“…Other problems with additional considerations are included in the GALBP class [3], as is the case in which the assignment of tasks is restricted [4] or when certain tasks must be assigned in block [5].…”

Manufacturing system design based on axiomatic design: Case of assembly line

“…Balancing (Scholl, Fliedner & Boysen, 2011), configuration (Nourmohammadi et al, 2013, selection of resources (Miralles, García-Sabater, Andrés & Cardós, 2008), transport (Asar & Andrew, 2001) etc. Then the activity A-0 is decomposed in five small activities as it is indicated in Figure 5.…”