Productivity Improvement Through Assembly Line Balancing

Abstract Balancing assembly lines becomes one of the most important activities for an industrial manufacturing system that should be supervised carefully. The success of achieving the goal of production is influenced significantly by balancing assembly lines. An assembly line consists of workstations that produce a product as it moves successively from one workstation to the next. The work content on a typical assembly line is composed of many separate and distinct work elements. The line balancing problem is concerned with assigning individual work elements to workstations so that all workers have an equal amount of work. Two important concepts in line balancing are the separation of the total work content into minimum rational work elements and the precedence constraints that must be satisfied by these elements. A minimum rational work element is a small amount of work that has a specified objective. A minimum rational work element cannot be subdivided any further without loss of practicality. In addition, there are restrictions on the order in which the work elements can be performed. These technological requirements on the work sequence are called precedence constraints. The precedence constraints can be presented graphically in the form of a precedence diagram, a network diagram that indicates the sequence in which work elements must be performed. This study involved applying the three heuristic algorithms to study process planning for a manual assembly of a commercial appliance. A total of 101 work elements have been considered. The work breakdown structure lists the work elements with their corresponding service times and precedence. Three assembly line balancing methods have been explored, namely, the largest Candidate Rule (LCR), Kilbridge and Wester (KWC), and Ranked Positional Weight (RPW) to select best option for the Manual Assembly Line.