Proceedings of the International Conference on
Product Lifecycle Management    PLM'05
Emerging solutions and challenges for Global Networked Enterprise

PLM-SP1, 2005
 
(from Chapter 7: Product Assembly and Design)

 Full Citation and Abstract

Title: Line Balancing in the Real World
  Author(s): Emanuel Falkenauer
  Address: Optimal Design Av. Jeanne 19A boîte 2, B-1050 Brussels Belgium
E.Falkenauer @ optimaldesign.com
  Reference: PLM-SP1 - 2005 Proceedings,  pp. 360 - 370
  Abstract/
Summary
Line Balancing (LB) is a classic, well-researched Operations Research (OR) optimization problem of significant industrial importance. It is one of those problems where domain expertise does not help very much: whatever the number of years spent solving it, one is each time facing an intractable problem with an astronomic number of possible solutions and no real guidance on how to solve it in the best way, unless one postulates that the old way is the best way. Here we explain an apparent paradox: although many algorithms have been proposed in the past, and despite the problem’s practical importance, just one commercially available LB software currently appears to be available for application in industries such as automotive. We speculate that this may be due to a misalignment between the academic LB problem addressed by OR, and the actual problem faced by the industry.
 
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