IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/proeco/v242y2021ics0925527321002681.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An analysis of task assignment and cycle times when robots are added to human-operated assembly lines, using mathematical programming models

Author

Listed:
  • Koltai, Tamás
  • Dimény, Imre
  • Gallina, Viola
  • Gaal, Alexander
  • Sepe, Chiara

Abstract

Adding robots to a human-operated assembly line influences both the short- and long-term operation of the line. However, the effects of robots on assembly line capacity and on cycle time can only be studied if appropriate task assignment models are available. This paper shows how traditional assembly line balancing models can be changed in order to determine the optimal number of workstations and cycle time when robots with different technological capabilities are able to perform a predetermined set of tasks. The mathematical programming models for the following three cases are presented and analysed: i) only workers are assigned to the workstations; ii) either a worker or a robot is assigned to a workstation; iii) a robot and a worker are also assigned to specific workstations. The data of an assembly line producing power inverters is used to illustrate the proposed calculations. Both the assignment of tasks and the changes of cycle time are analysed within the AIMMS modelling environment. The computational characteristics of the proposed mathematical programming models are also examined and tested using benchmark problems. The models presented in this paper can assist operations management in making decisions relating to assembly line configuration.

Suggested Citation

  • Koltai, Tamás & Dimény, Imre & Gallina, Viola & Gaal, Alexander & Sepe, Chiara, 2021. "An analysis of task assignment and cycle times when robots are added to human-operated assembly lines, using mathematical programming models," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 242(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:proeco:v:242:y:2021:i:c:s0925527321002681
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2021.108292
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527321002681
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ijpe.2021.108292?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nick T. Thomopoulos, 2014. "Assembly Line Planning and Control," Springer Books, Springer, edition 127, number 978-3-319-01399-2, December.
    2. Amaia Lusa, 2008. "A survey of the literature on the multiple or parallel assembly line balancing problem," European Journal of Industrial Engineering, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 2(1), pages 50-72.
    3. Borba, Leonardo & Ritt, Marcus & Miralles, Cristóbal, 2018. "Exact and heuristic methods for solving the Robotic Assembly Line Balancing Problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 270(1), pages 146-156.
    4. Boysen, Nils & Fliedner, Malte & Scholl, Armin, 2007. "A classification of assembly line balancing problems," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 183(2), pages 674-693, December.
    5. Scholl, Armin & Becker, Christian, 2006. "State-of-the-art exact and heuristic solution procedures for simple assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 168(3), pages 666-693, February.
    6. Bukchin, Yossi & Raviv, Tal, 2018. "Constraint programming for solving various assembly line balancing problems," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 57-68.
    7. Boysen, Nils & Fliedner, Malte & Scholl, Armin, 2008. "Assembly line balancing: Which model to use when," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(2), pages 509-528, February.
    8. Scholl, Armin, 1995. "Balancing and sequencing of assembly lines," Publications of Darmstadt Technical University, Institute for Business Studies (BWL) 9690, Darmstadt Technical University, Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law, Institute for Business Studies (BWL).
    9. E. H. Bowman, 1960. "Assembly-Line Balancing by Linear Programming," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 8(3), pages 385-389, June.
    10. Battaïa, Olga & Dolgui, Alexandre, 2013. "A taxonomy of line balancing problems and their solutionapproaches," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(2), pages 259-277.
    11. William W. White, 1961. "Letter to the Editor---Comments on a Paper by Bowman," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 9(2), pages 274-276, April.
    12. Scholl, Armin & Fliedner, Malte & Boysen, Nils, 2010. "Absalom: Balancing assembly lines with assignment restrictions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 200(3), pages 688-701, February.
    13. Otto, Alena & Scholl, Armin, 2011. "Incorporating ergonomic risks into assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 212(2), pages 277-286, July.
    14. Miralles, Cristobal & Garcia-Sabater, Jose Pedro & Andres, Carlos & Cardos, Manuel, 2007. "Advantages of assembly lines in Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled. A case study," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(1-2), pages 187-197, October.
    15. Becker, Christian & Scholl, Armin, 2006. "A survey on problems and methods in generalized assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 168(3), pages 694-715, February.
    16. Levitin, Gregory & Rubinovitz, Jacob & Shnits, Boris, 2006. "A genetic algorithm for robotic assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 168(3), pages 811-825, February.
    17. Gokcen, Hadi & Agpak, Kursad & Benzer, Recep, 2006. "Balancing of parallel assembly lines," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(2), pages 600-609, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Battaïa, Olga & Dolgui, Alexandre, 2022. "Hybridizations in line balancing problems: A comprehensive review on new trends and formulations," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 250(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Boysen, Nils & Schulze, Philipp & Scholl, Armin, 2022. "Assembly line balancing: What happened in the last fifteen years?," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 301(3), pages 797-814.
    2. Lopes, Thiago Cantos & Sikora, C.G.S. & Molina, Rafael Gobbi & Schibelbain, Daniel & Rodrigues, L.C.A. & Magatão, Leandro, 2017. "Balancing a robotic spot welding manufacturing line: An industrial case study," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 263(3), pages 1033-1048.
    3. Otto, Alena & Otto, Christian & Scholl, Armin, 2013. "Systematic data generation and test design for solution algorithms on the example of SALBPGen for assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 228(1), pages 33-45.
    4. Battaïa, Olga & Dolgui, Alexandre, 2013. "A taxonomy of line balancing problems and their solutionapproaches," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(2), pages 259-277.
    5. García-Villoria, Alberto & Corominas, Albert & Nadal, Adrià & Pastor, Rafael, 2018. "Solving the accessibility windows assembly line problem level 1 and variant 1 (AWALBP-L1-1) with precedence constraints," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 271(3), pages 882-895.
    6. Borba, Leonardo & Ritt, Marcus & Miralles, Cristóbal, 2018. "Exact and heuristic methods for solving the Robotic Assembly Line Balancing Problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 270(1), pages 146-156.
    7. Eduardo Álvarez-Miranda & Jordi Pereira & Harold Torrez-Meruvia & Mariona Vilà, 2021. "A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm for the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem with a Fixed Number of Workstations," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(17), pages 1-19, September.
    8. Scholl, Armin & Boysen, Nils, 2009. "Designing parallel assembly lines with split workplaces: Model and optimization procedure," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 119(1), pages 90-100, May.
    9. Sternatz, Johannes, 2015. "The joint line balancing and material supply problem," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 304-318.
    10. Parames Chutima, 2022. "A comprehensive review of robotic assembly line balancing problem," Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Springer, vol. 33(1), pages 1-34, January.
    11. Christian Weckenborg & Karsten Kieckhäfer & Christoph Müller & Martin Grunewald & Thomas S. Spengler, 2020. "Balancing of assembly lines with collaborative robots," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 13(1), pages 93-132, April.
    12. Sternatz, Johannes, 2014. "Enhanced multi-Hoffmann heuristic for efficiently solving real-world assembly line balancing problems in automotive industry," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 235(3), pages 740-754.
    13. Armin Scholl & Nils Boysen & Malte Fliedner, 2009. "Optimally solving the alternative subgraphs assembly line balancing problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 243-258, November.
    14. Scholl, Armin & Fliedner, Malte & Boysen, Nils, 2010. "Absalom: Balancing assembly lines with assignment restrictions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 200(3), pages 688-701, February.
    15. Minghai Yuan & Hongyan Yu & Jinting Huang & Aimin Ji, 2019. "Reconfigurable assembly line balancing for cloud manufacturing," Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Springer, vol. 30(6), pages 2391-2405, August.
    16. Klindworth, Hanne & Otto, Christian & Scholl, Armin, 2012. "On a learning precedence graph concept for the automotive industry," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 217(2), pages 259-269.
    17. Lale Özbakır & Gökhan Seçme, 2022. "A hyper-heuristic approach for stochastic parallel assembly line balancing problems with equipment costs," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 22(1), pages 577-614, March.
    18. Otto, Alena & Li, Xiyu, 2020. "Product sequencing in multiple-piece-flow assembly lines," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    19. Walter, Rico & Schulze, Philipp & Scholl, Armin, 2021. "SALSA: Combining branch-and-bound with dynamic programming to smoothen workloads in simple assembly line balancing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 295(3), pages 857-873.
    20. Chica, Manuel & Bautista, Joaquín & Cordón, Óscar & Damas, Sergio, 2016. "A multiobjective model and evolutionary algorithms for robust time and space assembly line balancing under uncertain demand," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 55-68.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:proeco:v:242:y:2021:i:c:s0925527321002681. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpe .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.