A comparative study of heuristic General Assembly Line Balancing techniques

In this paper, a comparative study of 16 General Assembly Line Balancing (GALB) techniques has been made to assess their effectiveness in grouping the tasks into work stations along the line while seeking to minimise the number of work stations and to identify the problems for which each method is most effective. Most of the Simple Assembly Line Balancing (SALB) techniques, which consider only cycle time and precedence constraints, are modified to accommodate the various practical constraints and converted to GALB techniques. The heuristic decision rules investigated here are list processing procedures that consider a single attribute of each work task for assignment to work station. This also includes a backtracking decision rule which attempts to locate an improved solution. Some of the previous studies on SALB have investigated the problem of determining the minimum cycle time for a given line length (work stations). This study, on the other hand, tries to compare GALB techniques with the objective of balancing each line to determine the minimum number of work stations for a given cycle time. A large number of randomly generated problems are tested to compare the heuristics.