Article ID: | iaor19992862 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 109 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 1 |
End Page Number: | 23 |
Publication Date: | Aug 1998 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Miltenburg John |
Keywords: | manufacturing industries, programming: dynamic |
U-shaped production lines and facilities consisting of many such lines are important parts of modern manufacturing systems. The problem of balancing and rebalancing U-line facilities is studied in this paper. Like the traditional line balancing problem this problem is NP-hard. The objective is to assign tasks to a minimum number of regular, crossover, and multiline stations while satisfying cycle time, precedence, location, and station-type constraints. A secondary objective is to concentrate the idle time in one station so that improvement efforts can be focused there in accordance with modern just-in-time principles. A reaching dynamic programming algorithm is presented for determining optimal balances. It is effective for balancing and rebalancing facilities with any number of U-lines, provided that individual U-lines do not have more than 22 tasks and do not have wide, sparse precedence graphs.