New approaches for rebalancing an assembly line with disruptions

ABSTRACT

In an assembly line system, the production process may suffer a sudden disruption, and this may call for rebalancing. In this paper, the assembly line rebalancing problem is set in a multiperiod context considering stochastic processing times. It is assumed that there are specific moments in time chosen for rebalancing the line (if necessary). Two policies, a periodic rebalancing policy and a data-driven rebalancing policy, are proposed to solve the rebalancing problem. The goal is to minimize the total cost, which include production and rebalancing costs. An empirical study is conducted, and several results are achieved: rebalancing an assembly line is sometimes worse than not rebalancing it; rebalancing an assembly line too often may not be beneficial; and the new data-driven policy introduced is better than the plain multiperiod policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Assembly line rebalancing
• uncertain task times
• multiperiod policy
• data-driven policy

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China 71901006 and by National Funding from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, under the project: UID/MAT/04561/2019.

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on this work, which helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One combination is said to be dominated by another when both the number of rebalances and the makespan for the latter are smaller than or equal to the corresponding values for the former (the equality can occur at most once).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71901006]; Beijing Social Science Fund [19GLC053]; National Funding from FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia [UID/MAT/04561/2019].