Subject: Industrial Engineering And Management

Topic: Facility Design

Difficulty: High

Definition of Assembly Line Balancing:

Assembly Line Balancing may be defined as assigning number of work elements to various workstations so as to maximize Balancing Efficiency or to minimize Number of workstations or to accomplish any other given Objective function for a given volume of output without violating the precedence relationship.

Another way of defining ALB is assigning the tasks to a minimum number of workstations for a given cycle time and / or to reduce the probability of linestop page in a production line.

Assembly line balancing (ALB) relates to a finite set of work elements or tasks, each having an operation processing time and a set of precedence relations, which specify the permissible orderings of the tasks. One of the problems in organizing mass production is how to group work tasks to be performed on workstations so as to achieve the desired level of performance.

The aim of assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) is to assign activities to stations with respect to the precedence relationships and other constraints while some measurements of performance are optimized.

Two main types of measurements have been used in the ALBPs. The first one is technical measurements such as cycle time, balance delay or total idle time, and minimizing the number of workstations. The second one is economic measurements like profit maximization and cost minimization.

BENEFITS OF ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING:

• Minimizing the number of workstations for a given cycles.

• Minimizing the cycle time for a given number of numbers of workstations.

• Minimizing the balance delay (or) maximizing the balancing efficiency.

• Minimizing the total idle time.

• Minimizing the overall facility or line length.