Balancing assembly lines: an industrial case study

This paper presents a case study where a practical balancing problem for an assembly line of appliances with two sides and two different heights is solved with an enhanced priority-based heuristic. We show how to adapt such heuristic to account for the practical aspects of industrial applications. We also show that a good use of logic and randomness in the algorithm is the key to allow the heuristic to find good solutions. In order to speed up its implementation and to facilitate software maintenance, we have implemented the heuristic on MsAccess97. It takes less than 1 min on a standard PC to solve a problem having 248 tasks, 400 precedence constraints, and four task attributes. Although this is slower than if it would have been implemented on a compilable language, the benefits of such computer environment largely outweigh its low speed.