Project description

The objective is to design the method and to develop the models and calculation instruments for the design and/or balancing of one or more production/assembly lines that, together, have the specified production capacity; all this in a deterministic context and with the priority objective of obtaining the optimal solution. On the other hand, it is intended to address the problem from a more general perspective and related to the reality that the works developed to date.

Specifically, the following four usual restrictive assumptions in the literature are addressed: 1) existence of a single line: at the time of design the number of lines that will comprise the production system must be decided; 2) graph of precedence between single tasks: the route of production/assembly of a product is a decision that must be taken while designing/balancing the line; 3) all stations are the same: in reality the stations (or the workers assigned to these stations) may be different for various reasons (they may have a different cost, the execution times of the tasks may be, and in fact they are, different, depending on the person who executes the tasks and the equipment available at each station,...); and 4) there are no preparation/change times when executing the activities assigned to one station: but moving from executing one task to another requires, on many occasions, preparing a tool or using a different one, which implies a change time that is depending on the order in which these tasks are executed, that is, the sequence of tasks.

Amount: 74.060,00 €