Assembly line balancing is a classic ill-structured problem where total enumeration is infeasible and optimal solutions uncertain for industrial problems. A quantitative approach to classifying problem difficulty and solution quality is therefore important. Two existing measures of difficulty, Order Strength and West Ratio are compared to a new compound expression of difficulty, Project Index. ...

With increasing cost competition and product variety, providing an efficient Just-inTime (JIT) supply has become one of the greatest challenges in the use of mixedmodel assembly line production systems. In the present paper, therefore, we propose a new approach for scheduling JIT part supply from a central storage center. Usually, materials are stored in boxes that are allotted to the consumpti...

This work addresses a balancing problem approach whose objective is to minimizing the ergonomic risk dispersion between the set of workstations of a mixed-model assembly line and the risk level of the workstation with the greatest hazard. A GRASP procedure is proposed to achieve these two challenges simultaneously. This new procedure is compared with two Mixed Integer Linear Programs, the MILP-...