A Method Of Assembly Line Balancing Problem With Uncertain Operation Time

Abstract

The assembly line balancing problems are significant in mass production systems. In order to solve the uncertainties that practically exist but barely mentioned in the literature,this paper proposed a mathematical model with an optimization algorithm to solve the assembly line balancing problem with uncertainty operation time. The developed model is able to work with variable number of workstations under the uncertain environment, aiming to reach the minimal number of workstation and minimize idle time for each workstation. In particular, the proposed approach first introduces the concept of protection time that closely works with the uncertain operation time.Four dominance rules and the mechanism of determining up and low bounds are subsequently put forward, which serve as the basis for the proposed branch and bound algorithm. And experimental results show the proposed work verified on a benchmark data set is able to solve the uncertainties efficiently.