Unbalanced assembly line research has grown in importance because of its increasing applications in emerging economies, reverse logistics and remanufacturing. This paper examines the performance of numerous simulated patterns for reliable unbalanced manual merging assembly lines. The contribution of this study to the literature is that imbalance does not always negatively impact efficiency and that it can improve merging line performance when compared to a corresponding balanced merging line. The best performance was found to be a balanced line configuration and a monotone decreasing order for both parallel merging lines, with the former generally resulting in a lower throughput and the latter resulting in a lower average buffer level than that of a balanced line.
Keywords: Merging lines, imbalance patterns, average buffer level, throughput, simulation
@article{RO_2021__55_1_99_0,
author = {McNamara, Tom and Shaaban, Sabry and Sbihi, Abdelkader and Laarraf, Zouhair},
title = {The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines},
journal = {RAIRO. Operations Research},
pages = {99--113},
year = {2021},
publisher = {EDP-Sciences},
volume = {55},
number = {1},
doi = {10.1051/ro/2020126},
mrnumber = {4223880},
language = {en},
url = {https://www.numdam.org/articles/10.1051/ro/2020126/}
}
TY - JOUR AU - McNamara, Tom AU - Shaaban, Sabry AU - Sbihi, Abdelkader AU - Laarraf, Zouhair TI - The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines JO - RAIRO. Operations Research PY - 2021 SP - 99 EP - 113 VL - 55 IS - 1 PB - EDP-Sciences UR - https://www.numdam.org/articles/10.1051/ro/2020126/ DO - 10.1051/ro/2020126 LA - en ID - RO_2021__55_1_99_0 ER -
%0 Journal Article %A McNamara, Tom %A Shaaban, Sabry %A Sbihi, Abdelkader %A Laarraf, Zouhair %T The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines %J RAIRO. Operations Research %D 2021 %P 99-113 %V 55 %N 1 %I EDP-Sciences %U https://www.numdam.org/articles/10.1051/ro/2020126/ %R 10.1051/ro/2020126 %G en %F RO_2021__55_1_99_0
McNamara, Tom; Shaaban, Sabry; Sbihi, Abdelkader; Laarraf, Zouhair. The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines. RAIRO. Operations Research, Tome 55 (2021) no. 1, pp. 99-113. doi: 10.1051/ro/2020126
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