Evaluation of alternative assembly line arrangements with stochastic operation times

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a computer simulation model to evaluate increasing versus decreasing mean operation times assembly line arrangement for normal and exponential distributions and the variances equal to 1 and 16.Design/methodology/approach – The model was developed on the basis of a realistic case problem and applied to a six‐station assembly line. The evaluation criteria were: the minimization of the total elapsed time; the maximization of the average percentage of working time; and the minimization of the average time in the system.Findings – The increasing mean operation times line arrangement is superior to the decreasing mean operation times line arrangement for the normal and exponential distributions and the variances equal to 1 and 16, in terms of the total elapsed time and the average percentage of the working time evaluation criteria. The decreasing mean operation times lines is marginally superior to the increasing operation times line for the normal distribution ...