Optimizing ergonomic in manual assembly line balancing problem

Nowadays, ergonomic has an important consideration when dealing with manual assembly line balancing problems because of the effects it can have on both productivity and human factor issues. In this case, the human factor has become an essential decision- making component within the company. The design of an assembly line can optimize ergonomic aspects based on the anthropometric and physiological characteristics of the workers. Assembly line balancing (ALB) assign individual tasks to work stations while respecting the physical, safety and quality requirements. The fundamental ALB problem is the way of getting an optimal assignment of tasks to the stations respecting well determined constraints and reaching certain objectives. This problem is often an active research area. In this paper, a new manual ALBP model is proposed. The contribution of this paper is based on the assignment of assembly tasks to workstations while taking into account a set of human operators that are actually available in a firm. Workers are assigned based on anthropometric and physiological characteristics such as arm measurement. The arm spam measurement will be considered in the proposed model like the length of the workstation for the operator to execute the work task comfortably. The objective of the problem is the minimization of the number of workstations to reduce the length of the novel line designed. An illustrated example randomly generated is finally tested with LINGO software and discussed.