Production Line Efficiency

Chapter 3

Unbalanced Lines Studied

Introduction

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

We are going to look at several different cases of unbalanced lines in which we vary the line length and total buffer capacity and look at the imbalance not only from one source (e.g., buffer capacity ...