Pace making and worker reassignment for assembly line rebalancing
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Pace making and worker reassignment for assembly line rebalancing Gerçek Budak1 · Xin Chen1 Received: 17 April 2020 / Accepted: 19 August 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The objective of this article is to develop a mathematical model that helps foremen rebalance assembly lines in real time. Assembly lines with a large number of workstations go through extensive line balancing to determine production rates. Once production begins, one or more workstations may not operate at predetermined production rates due to disturbances, and the assembly line requires rebalancing. Previous research largely focused on task reassignment for rebalancing. Effective and efficient tools for real-time line rebalancing are needed. This research focuses on rebalancing of unpaced and asynchronous assembly lines through pace making and worker reassignment. A mixed integer programming model is developed and its optimal solution determines which workstations pace up (increase production rates) and the amount of increase, which workstations pace down (decrease production rates) and the amount of decrease, and whether workers from certain workstations are reassigned to work at other workstations to decrease the production rates of the former and increase the production rates of the latter. Foremen may use these recommendations to rebalance assembly lines by adjusting production rates and reassigning workers. Numerical results show that the solution time of the model is less than one second, which enables real-time line rebalancing for large assembly lines. Keywords Assembly line rebalancing · Mixed integer programming · Pace making · Unpaced and asynchronous assembly line · Worker reassignment
1 Introduction Assembly lines have been in use for decades and are ubiquitous in today’s manufacturing and production systems. As more and more products transition from mass production (make-to-stock) to mass customization (make-toorder), balancing of assembly lines aims to meet customers’ demand and reduce production cost. Assembly line balancing is one of the most important decisions for largescale production. Becker and Scholl [6] defined line balancing as assigning tasks to workstations to balance workload. Kara et al. [15] suggested several objectives of line balancing (e.g., minimizing total cost and difference in workload for workstations and maximizing production rate). There are many variations and extensions of the classical line balancing problem [6–9]. This paper investigates a common
yet challenging problem that foremen of assembly lines face on a regular basis: whether and how workers in an assembly line pace up or pace down to adjust production rates and are reassigned to different workstations if the assembly line does not operate at the production rates determined in line balancing. When operations of an assembly line deviate from the prescribed parameters determined in line balancing, the assembly line must be rebalanced to minimize the impact caused by worker fatigue and lack of motivation, extra machine setup
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