A New Worker Policy for Self-Balancing Production Line with Stations

In traditional production lines, such as assembly lines, each worker is usually assigned to a particular fixed work, and decreasing the task to master the assigned work is valuated. However, when an imbalance exists between workers' speeds, if a worker delays the overall work in the production line, the production rate of the particular line will also decrease. To avoid this problem, the "Self-Balancing Production Line" was introduced. In this type of production line, each worker is assigned work dynamically, and when specific conditions are satisfied, production remains balanced. Characteristics of these lines that can be preempted at any place have already been analyzed by some researchers. A previous paper examined the situation in which only a single worker can process one machine and cannot preempt processing, and the improved policy of an ordinary selfbalancing production line, which specifies which stations workers can process and how workers can behave. This policy achieveda high production rate with only four stations and two workers (Buzacott, 2002). In that paper, worker processing stations and the behavior of a specific worker were limited, andthe paper focused only on specific stations and workers. Therefore, it is not applicable to any worker sequence. In this paper, we focus on other ways to decrease cycle time. In this kind of line, a worker processes at his or her speed. Therefore, if a worker is assigned stations according to his or her speed, the line can decrease cycle time. To do so, we relax the assumptions of this type of line and set a new condition. Under these conditions, we compare our results to the results of previous papers.