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In real world, line balancing involves existing lines in existing factories and the line typically needs to be rebalanced rather than balanced. Rebalancing of a U-line can be defined as a changeover process from its initial configuration to a new configuration for a while due to the reasons such as demand variations, changes in product design and changes in task times, etc. This study defines U-line rebalancing problem with stochastic task times and proposes a solution procedure based on ant colony optimisation. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to minimise total cost of rebalancing which is the sum of task transposition costs, workstation opening/closing costs and operating costs of workstations for a particular planning horizon. A comprehensive experiment is conducted to generate problem instances and to compare rebalancing costs of U-lines by means of several factors. A total of 6600 rebalancing solutions are obtained and several comparisons are performed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The basic assumption of assembly line balancing is that every task's time is fixed. However, in practice, different processing alternatives may be available to process a task with different times. The problem in this case is to assign tasks and resources to work stations that minimise total cost and so-called resource dependent assembly line balancing (RDALB) in the literature. This study proposes a new integer programming formulation for RDALB. This formulation is then modified to develop a formulation for RDULB problem in U-shaped assembly lines. To the best knowledge of the authors, this study is the first RDULB study and the developed formulation is the first RDULB formulation. The proposed formulations are illustrated and validated using several examples. An experimental analysis is also conducted to examine the percent improvement in total cost when the line layout is switched into the U-shaped from the straight line shape. Experimental results show that an improvement in total operating cost is obtained when the straight line is switched into the U-shaped line configuration. Results also show that percentage improvement in total operating cost is significantly greater for problem instances having a large number of tasks and having greater values for the strength of the precedence relationships among tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balancing parallel assembly lines provides flexibility to minimise the total idle times of assembly lines and the total number of workstations required in production facilities. This paper proposes two goal programming approaches to balance parallel assembly lines with precise and fuzzy goals. Three conflicting goals, namely number of workstations, cycle time, and number of tasks assigned to a workstation are optimised in crisp and fuzzy environments. The proposed approaches are also illustrated using numerical examples and sensitivity analyses. The proposed approaches provide flexibility for decision makers to balance parallel assembly lines based on their decision environments and preferred priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]