Balancing Assembly Lines and Matching Demand Through Worker Reallocations

摘要

Assembly lines are of great importance in most actual production systems and thus continue attracting strong research interest. We address a real industry scenario where the aim of the line is to target a production output that meets, as much as possible, a given demand forecast. To the best of our knowledge, the existing literature has not tackled this problem, and we named it the demand-driven assembly line (re)balancing problem. A mixed integer programming model is developed, solved using genetic algorithm, and tested in the straight assembly line, providing useful insights about the dynamics of worker reallocations.