AN OPTIMAL BALANCING OF ASSEMBLY LINE USING RPW TECHNIQUE

Abstract

The traditional assembly line balancing problem considers the manufacturing process of a product where production is specified in terms of a sequence of tasks that need to be assigned to workstations. Each task takes a known number of time units to complete. Also, precedence constraints exist among tasks: each task can be assigned to a station only after all its predecessors have been assigned to stations. The assembly line balancing problem arises and has to be solved when an assembly line has to be configured or redesigned. It consists of distributing the total work load for manufacturing any unit of the product to be assembled among the workstations along the line. In this paper Rank positional weight method is used to arrive to a feasible solution for a batch production unit to increase the production rate to 24 machines per day. Further using the same algorithm, better solutions are also proposed by reducing the cycle time and number of work stations.