TECNICAS DE BALANCEO DE LINEAS

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 1

Line Balancing in the Real World

Emanuel Falkenauer

Optimal Design Av. Jeanne 19A boîte 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium +32 (0)2 646 10 74 E.Falkenauer@optimaldesign.com

Abstract: Line Balancing (LB) is a classic, well-researched Operations Research (OR) optimization problem of significant industrial importance. It is one of those problems where domain expertise does not help very much: whatever the number of years spent solving it, one is each time facing an intractable problem with an astronomic number of possible solutions and no real guidance on how to solve it in the best way, unless one postulates that the old way is the best way. Here we explain an apparent paradox: although many algorithms have been proposed in the past, and despite the problem’s practical importance, just one commercially available LB software currently appears to be available for application in industries such as automotive. We speculate that this may be due to a misalignment between the academic LB problem addressed by OR, and the actual problem faced by the industry.

1 Introduction

Assembly Line Balancing, or simply Line Balancing (LB), is the problem of assigning operations to workstations along an assembly line, in such a way that the assignment be optimal in some sense. Ever since Henry Ford’s introduction of assembly lines, LB has been an optimization problem of significant industrial importance: the efficiency difference between an optimal and a sub-optimal assignment can yield economies (or waste) reaching millions of dollars per year.

LB is a classic Operations Research (OR) optimization problem, having been tackled by OR over several decades. Many algorithms have been proposed for the problem. Yet despite the practical importance of the problem, and the OR efforts that have been made to tackle it, little commercially available software is available to help industry in optimizing their lines. In fact, according to a recent survey by Becker and Scholl (2004), there appear to be currently just two commercially available packages featuring both a state of the art optimization algorithm and a user-friendly interface for data management. Furthermore, one of those packages appears to handle only the “clean” formulation of the problem (Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem, or SALBP), which leaves only one package available for

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