U-SHAPED ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING WITH TEMPORARY WORKERS

Authors

  • Koichi Nakade Nagoya Instutute of Technology
  • Akiyasu Ito Nagoya Instutute of Technology
  • Syed Mithun Ali Nagoya Instutute of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23055/ijietap.2015.22.1.1211

Keywords:

U-shaped line, assembly line balancing

Abstract

U-shapedassembly lines are useful in an efficient allocation of workers tostations. In assembly lines, temporary workers are placed to correspond to thefluctuation of demand. Sets of feasible tasks for temporary workers aredifferent from those of permanent workers. The tasks which are familiar to permanent workers also vary.  For the U-shaped assembly balancing problem under these situations the optimal cycle times for a given numberof temporary workers and the optimal number of workers for given cycle time arederived and compared between U-shaped line balancing and straight linebalancing. We also discuss the optimal allocation for a single U-shaped lineand two U-shaped lines. In several cases, in particular when high throughputsare required, it is shown numerically that the number of temporary workers inoptimal allocation for two lines is less than that of optimal allocation for asingle line.

Author Biographies

Koichi Nakade, Nagoya Instutute of Technology

Department of Civil Engineering and Systems Management

Akiyasu Ito, Nagoya Instutute of Technology

Department of Civil Engineering and Systems Management

Syed Mithun Ali, Nagoya Instutute of Technology

Department of Civil Engineering and Systems Management

Published

2015-02-27

How to Cite

Nakade, K., Ito, A., & Ali, S. M. (2015). U-SHAPED ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING WITH TEMPORARY WORKERS. International Journal of Industrial Engineering: Theory, Applications and Practice, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.23055/ijietap.2015.22.1.1211

Issue

Section

Special Issue: 2013 IJIE Conference at Busan, Korea