A design strategy for allocation of facilities in an assembly line system for throughput maximization and bottleneck control

An optimal design strategy is developed to control the bottleneck problem, and for optimal utilization of a finite capacity integrated assembly line system (consisting of a set of tandem workstations, a set of inspection stations, a loading station and an unloading station, lined by a material handling system). To develop the proposed design strategy, a stochastic optimization model is presented to allocate flexible facilities amongst a set of workstations, such that the throughput rate from the system is maximized, while the resulting probability of finding either a workstation or a transporter station blocked will be sufficiently close to zero. The proposed stochastic optimization model is a non-linear chance constrained mixed integer programming model which is transformed into a deterministic mixed integer programming model, and is solved by a branch and bound algorithm.