The related activity concept in assembly line balancing

Abstract

An assembly operation may be considered to be related to some operations and unrelated to others. The relationship can be by way of their belonging in the same subassembly, interdependence upon one another, etc. Workers performing operations related to one another are likely to get more job satisfaction, while management will find it easier to fix accountability for defects. Besides, the dependence of workers on each other will reduce, giving the line designer's greater flexibility in sequencing the workers, so that a variety of secondary objectives can be pursued.

A decision rule for alloting the work, called the largest set rule is proposed in this paper. This rule allots a set of related operations to a worker as against the usual operation-by-operation allotment, thereby giving much more flexibility in sequencing the workers.