Two-sided assembly line balancing to maximize work relatedness and slackness

This paper considers two-sided (left- and right-side) assembly lines that are often used in assembling large-sized products, such as trucks and buses. A large number of exact algorithms and heuristics have been proposed to balance one-sided assembly lines. However, little attention has been paid to balancing the two-sided lines. An efficient assignment procedure is developed for two-sided assembly line balancing problems. A special emphasis is placed on maximizing work relatedness and maximizing work slackness, which are of practical significance especially in two-sided lines. We first investigate the characteristics of two-sided lines and define new measures for the balancing. Then, a group assignment procedure, which assigns a group of tasks at a time rather than a unit task, is designed. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our procedure is promising in the solution quality.