Designing paced assembly lines with fixed number of stations

This paper addresses the issue of allocating tasks among workstations in assembly lines so that the cycle time is minimized (Type II problem). We provide a two stage heuristic procedure, which is based on an integer programming formulation of the problem. It is a simplexlike procedure which, while attempting to minimize the cycle time, also smooths out the workload among the workstations. Computational results show that our procedure performs well for Type II problems. Tests on problems from the literature indicate that the smoothing stage of our procedure can be used effectively to level workloads for any given task allocations among tasks. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.