THE COST-ORIENTED STOCHASTIC ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING PROBLEM: A CHANCE CONSTRAINED PROGRAMMING APPROACH

In recent years, the increase in industry competition has caused the costs of production to become a critical success factor. A considerable proportion of manufacturing activities and costs is devoted to the assembly of products. Therefore, in successful assembly line production systems, a reduction in production costs is a necessity. From an economic point of view, cost-oriented objectives for assembly line balancing should be considered. This issue is addressed as a cost-oriented assembly line balancing problem, in order to fill a gap in the existing literature on the stochastic version of the cost-oriented assembly line balancing problem. A chance-constrained programing model is proposed in this paper; to linearize the model, two methods have been adopted from Agpak and Gokcen (2007), an approximation method and an exact one. The resulting models have been tested on different problems in order to assess their effectiveness. A comparative study has also been conducted for the cost- and time-oriented versions of the problem.