Nowadays, many products like cars are becoming more complex and consist of many parts
produced by different suppliers. For final assembly, all necessary assembly tasks need to be
distributed among workers. Work stations should be balanced in a smooth way to reduce idle
times of workers and, hence, costs. An ongoing trend of assembling ever more products on a
single assembly line, leads to space scarcity at assembly stations. Therefore, I investigate assembly
line balancing with multiple products assuming limited but variable space, e.g., by making one
station smaller, a neighboring station can be enlarged.
In assembly systems, in addition to balancing, decisions on the way to provide parts need to be
taken. E.g., pallets or sequenced containers may be provided. In the first case all variants of a part
are stored on different pallets at a station. In the latter case, different variants of the same part
are preselected, sorted in the order of demand and provided in a single container. Obviously,
there is a tradeoff between handling effort necessary to prepare containers in the latter case and
space consumption and higher walking costs in the former case. The assembly line feeding
problem describes the investigation of decision making for this problem.
The main research objective of this project is the investigation of a joint optimization of assembly
line balancing and assembly line feeding aiming for a holistic cost minimization of the overall
assembly system.