Integrated assembly and resource planning in production line design

We present two resource planning approaches: one for the design of assembly lines whose operations are executed by a unique assembly method, the other one for hybrid assembly lines. The first approach assigns operations to workstations along the line by minimizing the number of the stations while the second one selects also the equipments to carry out the operations by minimizing the cost of the line. In both cases, our main concern was the quality of the resulting assembly line, in terms of the cost of the line and its suitability, to the user´s needs. However, in order to allow the designer of the assembly line to fine-tune the line exactly to his/her needs, we considered it important to give him/her the opportunity to test many variations of the line design problem, mainly in terms of the user preferences imposed. This meant to keep the response time of the underlying algorithm short, hence we also considered the speed of the algorithm