Two-sided assembly line balancing to maximize work relatedness and slackness

This paper considers two-sided (left- and right-side) assembly lines that are often used in assembling large-sized products, such as trucks and buses. A large number of exact algorithms and heuristics have been proposed to balance one-sided assembly lines. However, little attention has been paid to balancing the two-sided lines. An efficient assignment procedure is developed for two-sided assembly line balancing problems. A special emphasis is placed on maximizing work relatedness and maximizing work slackness, which are of practical significance especially in two-sided lines, We first investigate the characteristics of two-sided lines and define new measures for the balancing. Then, a group assignment procedure, which assigns a group of tasks at a time rather than a unit task, is designed. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our procedure is promising in the solution quality. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.