Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem with Positional Constraints

One of the most important operational issues in the assembly line is to assign tasks and workers to stations while balancing the workload of the workers. We consider the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem (ALWABP) where the process time of a task depends on worker skill levels. We also consider new positional constraints in the ALWABP to secure the working area of the workers. Two mathematical programming models are proposed to assign workers and tasks when new products are introduced and when a worker is absent or leaves a position temporary, respectively. A heuristic algorithm for the first model is proposed due to its extremely high complexity. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed methods. Finally, we explain how the proposed models can be used with a real-time dashboard of a digital twin.