Balancing assembly line in an electronics company

In general, the line balancing problem is defined as of finding an assignment of the given jobs to the workstations under the precedence constraints given to the set of jobs. Usually, the objective is either minimizing the cycle time under the given number of workstations or minimizing the number of workstations under the given cycle time. In this paper, we present a new type of an assembly line balancing problem which occurs in an electronics company manufacturing home appliances. The main difference of the problem compared to the general line balancing problem lies in the structure of the precedence given to the set of jobs. In the problem, the set of jobs is partitioned into two disjoint subjects. One is called the set of fixed jobs and the other, the set of floating jobs. The fixed jobs should be processed in the linear order and some pair of the jobs should not be assigned to the same workstations. Whereas, to each floating job, a set of ranges is given. The range is given in terms of two fixed jobs and it means that the floating job can be processed after the first job is processed and before the second job is processed. There can be more than one range associated to a floating job. We present a procedure to find an approximate solution to the problem. The procedure consists of two major parts. One is to find the assignment of the floating jobs under the given (feasible) assignment of the fixed jobs. The problem can be viewed as a constrained bin packing problem. The other is to find the assignment of the whole jobs under the given linear precedence on the set of the floating jobs. First problem is NP-hard and we devise a heuristic procedure to the problem based on the transportation problem and matching problem. The second problem can be solved in polynomial time by the shortest path method. The algorithm works in iterative manner. One step is composed of two phases. In the first phase, we solve the constrained bin packing problem. In the second phase, the shortest path problem is solved using the phase 1 result. The result of the phase 2 is used as an input to the phase 1 problem at the next step. We test the proposed algorithm on the set of real data found in the washing machine assembly line.