Designing an Assembly Line for Reliability

Conclusion

Since system failure is due to variations in human behavior, a stochastic setup has been considered for describing the situation. Further,reliability of a production system is as important as the product reliability and we have for the first time considered reliability optimization problem for an assembly line. For that purpose,a mathematical programming approach has been followed. A two-stage approach has been installed to arrive at the final solution to the dual objective problem of minimization of expected balancing loss and maximization of system reliability. For the purpose of reliability evaluation we have assumed normal distribution for task times. However, the proposed approach is a generic one and capable of solving different large or small, simple or complex assembly problems under different distributional assumptions.