Workload smoothing in two-sided assembly lines

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to define new criteria for measuring workload smoothness of two-sided assembly lines and propose an algorithm to solve a two-sided assembly line balancing problem focusing on distributing the idle time and the workload as evenly as possible among the workstations.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper points out that the mean absolute deviation (MAD) and the smoothness index (SI) used to measure the workload smoothing in one-sided assembly lines are both inappropriate to evaluate the workload balance among workstations in two-sided assembly lines, as the idle time occur at the beginning and in the middle of a cycle within workstations. Then, the finish-time-based SI and MAD (FSI and FMAD) are defined, and a heuristic procedure based on the core mechanism of Moodie and Young method is proposed to smooth the assembly workload in two-sided assembly lines.

Findings

The computational results indicate that the proposed heuristic algorithm combined with the FMAD is effective in distributing the idle time and the workload among workstations as evenly as possible in two-sided assembly lines.

Practical implications

The two-sided assembly line balancing problem with the objective of the line efficiency can be effectively solved by the proposed approach.

Originality/value

The FMAD is proposed to effectively improve the workload smoothing in two-sided assembly lines.

Citation

Hu, X. and Wu, C. (2018), "Workload smoothing in two-sided assembly lines", Assembly Automation, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 51-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/AA-09-2016-112