Assembly Line Balancing

Introduction to Industrial Engineering

The Line Balancing Problem

The problem is to arrange the individual processing and assembly tasks at the workstations so that the total time required at each workstation is approximately the same. Nearly impossible to reach perfect balance

Things to consider

Sequence of tasks is restricted, there is a required order Called precedence constraints There is a production rate needed, i.e. how many products needed per time period Design the line to meet demand and within constraints

Terminology and Definitions

Minimum Work Element Total Work Content Workstation Process time Cycle Time Precedence Constraints Balance Delay

Minimum Work Element

Dividing the job into tasks of a rational and smallest size Example: Drill a hole, cant be divided Symbol Time for element j: Tej is a constant

Tej

Total Work Content

Aggregate of work elements

Twc Tej
j 1

Workstation Process time

The amount of time for an individual workstation, after individual tasks have been combined into stations Sum of task times = sum of workstation times

Cycle time

Time between parts coming off the line Ideally, the production rate, but may need to be adjusted for efficiency and down time Established by the bottleneck station, that is station with largest time

Precedence Constraints

Generally given, determined by the required order of operations Draw in a network style for understanding Cannot violate these, an element must be complete before the next one is started

Balance Delay

Measure of line inefficiency due to imbalances in station times

nTc Twc d nTc

Method Largest Candidate Rule

List elements in descending order of T Assign elements to first station, from top to bottom of list, minding constraints, and not causing sum to exceed cycle time Continue assigning elements to stations where each station < cycle time, largest assigned first, until all assigned EXAMPLE