Mixed assembly line rebalancing: A binary integer approach applied to real world problems in the automotive industry

Industrial organizations have increasingly sought to optimize the resources needed for the manufacture of its products from the competition, in order to maintain their profit margins. The search for balance of resources and balanced distribution of tasks in various types of industrial environments is called balancing. When adjustments are made and adequacy of an assembly line that is already in operation, this process is called rebalancing. This paper presents a case study involving a problem of rebalancing of automotive assembly line in an environment of arbitrarily mixed models of products, also known as mix. The proposed procedure for solving the rebalancing in the company in question is based on Binary Integer Programming, in particular the branch and bound algorithm. For comparison, we used a heuristic method based on precedence diagrams for solving the rebalancing of lines. To evaluate the results obtained between the two procedures were used performance indicators such as number of workstations created, average load of work and level of unbalance. The proposed algorithm has resulted in significant improvements in the production line capacity.