A Web-based interactive advisor for assembly line balancing

Assembly line balancing (ALB) aims at distributing those work required to assemble a product in mass or series production among a set of workstations in an assembly line. Heuristics approaches, in corporation with computer simulation, have demonstrated a number of advantages in practice. Recognizing the importance of interactions between production planners and the scheduling system, this paper discusses the design and implementation of a Web-based ALB advisor for scheduling hard disk drive assembly involving multiple criteria. With the assistance of such an ALB advisor, production engineers, who may have difficulties in understanding those sophisticated ALB heuristics, can remotely present and specify their particular ALB problems. Based on the user input, the advisor will compose a schedule based on various heuristic algorithms embedded in its library. The schedule can be manipulated directly via a graphical user interface. The advisor also generates simulation models for the user-specified ALB problems and presents the user with performance evaluation of the suggested ALB solutions.