Improving the equality of workload assignments in assembly lines

Most heuristic and optimal methods for assembly line balancing are designed either to minimize the number of workstations required given a production rate, or to maximize the production rate given a fixed number of workstations. This singular focus on line design efficiency typically results in an imbalanced allocation of tasks among the stations. This paper presents a new procedure that rebalances a given solution to level the allocation of tasks. Characteristics of dominant levelled solutions are identified and incorporated into this heuristic procedure. Computational results indicate that the procedure is very effective in levelling workloads.