Interactive Excel-Based Procedure for Line Balancing

Abstract

Abstract. The assignment of tasks to workstations that results in the assembly of an item or provision of a service is a common topic of discussion in operations management (OM) courses. In this paper, we present an interactive Excel spreadsheet assisted procedure for assigning the required tasks. The procedure actively engages the student in the process and serves as a tool for learning how to effectively and efficiently assign the tasks to a series (line) of connected workstations. The Excel implementation provides more flexibility in selecting tasks than textbook or other Excel based methods that rely on certain priority rules, and is considerably easier to use than math programming models. The procedure and its spreadsheet implementation are illustrated and discussed, with an example.

Pace making and worker reassignment for assembly line rebalancing

“…Numerous studies were conducted to solve line balancing problems. For example, both branch and bound (e.g., [17] and dynamic programming may be used to find exact solutions for simple [18,30,34] and generalized assembly line balancing problems [6]. Heuristic algorithms (e.g., [19,21,35,37] were used to solve line balancing problems.…”