Study And Development Of Assembly Line Balancing System

Assembly line is a manufacturing system that is widely used. One of the important issues in designing and operating an assembly line is the line balance, for it has great effect on the productivity of the system. Thus, during the last several decades, extensive study on line balance has been conducted, and various algorithms are presented. However, although there is great deal of theoretical results, it lacks efficient software tools for line balance that is applicable in the practice. Nowadays, there are a large number of assembly lines in China that are poorly balanced. Hence, it is very meaningful to develop such a software tool for line balance.In this paper, an algorithm is developed and implemented to model the precedence constraints of the tasks in an assembly line by digraph, so that the user can describe and modify the problem easily. An algorithm base is built for the optimization of line balance. With this base, various algorithms for line balance can be chosen. When a solution is got, it can be displayed graphically. Based on the digraph description of the problem, the algorithm base, and the graphical display of solution, a software tool for line balance is successfully developed. By testing, it shows that the system works well.