Balancing assembly lines for teams and work groups

Abstract

Difficulties that arise in balancing assembly lines for teams and work groups are identified and addressed. When sets of tasks are assigned to specific teams prior to balancing, task precedence requirements sometimes make it impossible to attain a balance with members of a team located contiguously along the line. Where it is possible, low balance delay might be impossible to attain. Two resolutions are offered. The product can be designed so tasks assigned to a team can be performed together, or the line can be balanced using disconnected teams. The latter approach avoids some design costs and is easier to implement, but experiments show it is likely to incur substantial balance delay and so higher labour costs. The magnitude of these costs is found to increase with the number of teams and with the percentage of tasks that can be allocated to one team only. To derive the results, new branch-and-bound approaches are provided and tested. For self-managed work groups, comments are restricted to balancing group capacities.