Flow line balancing problem: A survey

Abstract

International audienceFlow lines are widely used in mechanical industry. They consist to a set of workstations through which parts are manufactured. Designing such a line is a very complex problem due to manufacturing and design constraints and to the large number of possible decisions. Usually, the design of this type of production lines involves the selection of the necessary operations (indivisible units of work) to machine a part, the configuration design, the line scheduling. In this paper we present a survey of flow lines balancing problem, their approach and formulation and some solutions to optimize them studied in the literature. A special attention is paid for the assembly lines balancing problems

Heuristic Approach for a Combined Transfer Line Balancing and Buffer Allocation Problem Considering Uncertain Demand

“…1 From the problem point of view, future studies could consider an increased problem complexity to be closer to a real industrial situation, which would mean taking some other neighboring problems or more detailed information of the machining parameters or the machine tools into consideration. 2 From the solution point of view, the concept of multi-fidelity to evaluate BAP or other sub-problems might also be another relevant area for future research studies, which may enhance the efficiency of the methods.…”

“…From the line balancing side, Battaïa et al [2] presented a more recent and relevant survey, where they focused on the articles solving these aggregated problems that involved both the balancing problem and its "neighbor" problems during the design stage of the production line. The authors classified and discussed three examples of problem combinations, which were "the process selection and line balancing", "the line layout design and balancing", and "the line balancing and task sequencing".…”