A Decision Support System for Assembly and Production Line Balancing

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, a system to support the design of assembly and production lines used in the make-to-order production phase is presented. The relevance of the system is supported by the fact that current market dynamics often leads to frequent modifications in the allocation of manufacturing resources, and, as a result, decisions related to manufacturing systems design that used to belong to the strategic level are now taken at the tactical level, and thus require new tools to support them.The decision support system addresses two different categories of problems: (i) assembly line balancing and (ii) production line balancing. Due to the high complexity of these problems, it uses heuristic methods based on evolutionary computation approaches to tackle them. The system aggregates several modules to address the different problems, a database to handle both input and output data and an interface that enables a user-friendly interaction with the decision maker.