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Designing mixed-product assembly lines

The purpose of this paper is to describe the main problems concerning the design and operation of mixed-product assembly lines. We will focus on the design of assembly lines, which is most of the time composed in three steps. The first is the elaboration of the logical layout of the line, which consists in the distribution of operations among workstations along the line. The second is the choice of the most efficient product mix and production sequence in relation to the operation phase. The third is the subsequent elaboration of the physical layout of the line, i.e., deciding about the disposition of the workstations, conveyor(s), possible buffers, etc., on the shop floor. In this paper, the accent will be put exclusively on the first two steps. The concept of balance for ordering (BFO) is introduced to solve these two interrelated problems. After an overview of the current work in this area, this paper presents in detail a very promising approach to solve the BFO: the grouping and ordering genetic algorithms (genetic algorithms heavily modified to solve grouping/ordering problems). In all cases, the main concern is the quality of the resulting line in terms of cost and its suitability to the line designer's needs (special user preferences are followed as closely as possible). Academic and experimental results are presented, and they confirm the efficiency of the proposed approaches.