Working time evaluation in assembly lines

Abstract

Assembly lines are special flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial mass production. This paper introduces the deterioration effects in assembly lines that the aim of the developed mathematical model and the proposed genetic algorithm is to minimise the working time of a product in a cycle of assembly. Task deterioration means that a task processed later consumes more time than the same task when it is processed earlier. At the end several well-known examples are solved and the results proved that the deterioration will affect both cycle time and working time, simultaneously.