Optimum assembly line balancing: A stochastic programming approach

Assembly line balancing problem is an approach of assigning a set of tasks to an ordered sequence of workstations. This assignment needs to be made in such a way that the underlying precedence constraints are not violated and efficiency measures are optimized subject to the restriction of the cycle time constraint. Research works, reported so far, mainly deal with the minimization of balancing loss, subject to precedence constraints. Lack of uniqueness in those optimum solutions and pressing demand to include system loss in the objective function have led to the present work of minimization of both balancing and system loss. As there is no standard measure for system loss, the current work proposes a measure for system loss and offers solution to this bi-objective problem.