Multi-product resource planning

This paper presents a line balancing method concerning the assembly of a family of products. The product variants are assembled following different assembly sequences (some operations are different or missing). The problem is to assign each operation to a workstation in order to meet production requirements at the minimum total system cost. Operations are assigned to workstations in such a way that: (1) no assembly precedence constraint of the family product is violated; (2) no workstation in the line takes on average longer than a predefined cycle time to perform all the tasks assigned to it; and (3) as few workstations as possible are needed to perform all the tasks in the set. A grouping genetic algorithm approach used to solve the single-product assembly line balancing (ALE) problem has been modified to handle the multi-product ALE problem. The result is a Multi-Product Resource Planner. Industrial tests are presented and confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm