Production Line Efficiency

CHAPTER 3

Unbalanced Lines Studied

Introduction

We now have a good basic understanding of what are the different elements of an assembly line that can be varied to improve performance, and we have a grasp of what performance measures we are using to judge this by—in this book, mainly idle time (IT) and average buffer levels (ABLs). We have seen that imbalance can come from different sources, namely the manner in which we distribute the buffer capacity and allocate workers with different average working times and with different variabilities.

We are going to look at several different cases of unbalanced lines where we vary the line length and total buffer capacity and look at imbalance not only from one source, for example, buffer capacity imbalance, ...