Chapter 7: Product Assembly and Design

Title: Line Balancing in the Real World

Author(s): Emanuel Falkenauer

Address: Optimal Design Av. Jeanne 19A boîte 2, B-1050 Brussels Belgium

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2005 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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