Equilibrado de lineas de montaje con ventanas de visibilidad.

Abstract

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) arise

when designing or modifying an assembly

or production line and usually consist in

assigning the tasks to the workstations along

the line in order to meet some given objectives.

Traditionally, it is assumed that there is exactly

one workpiece in each workstation and that the

workstation has access to the entire workpiece.

In practice, this assumption may be sometimes

too restrictive. An example is the case of

the automated assembly of printed circuit

boards. In this type of lines the length of the

workpiece might be larger than the width of

the workstation. Therefore, each workstation

can only access to the limited portion of the

workpieces that fall inside its accessibility

window. In this work we present an extension

of the ALBP to the case of workstations with

accessibility windows (AWALBP). The problem

is described and a simple-to-implement solving

procedure is proposed, which consists of i) an

algorithm to obtain a good initial solution and ii)

a simulated annealing algorithm for improving

the obtained solution. Finally, a computational

experience that validates the proposed procedure

is reported.