Balancing and scheduling of flexible mixed model assembly lines with parallel stations

Abstract

In this paper, we study flexible mixed model assembly lines with serially connected stages where stages may have one or more parallel stations. Station parallelism in flexible mixed model assembly lines improves system reliability and enables rapid adaptability to customer demand fluctuations. However, in order to effectively manage such lines under real-world conditions, there is a need to extend traditional assembly line management methods. This study extends the current research by simultaneously considering the problems of task assignment and model scheduling on parallel stations. Furthermore, scheduling of assigned tasks on each station is considered. We formulate the problem context first as a mixed integer programming model and then develop a decomposition scheme for large scale applications. Finally, we compare the performance of the proposed model and decomposition scheme using various size test instances.