The operating behaviour of unbalanced, unpaced merging assembly lines

Tom Mcnamara, Sabry Shaaban, Abdelkader Sbihi () and Zouhair Laarraf
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Tom Mcnamara: ESC [Rennes] - ESC Rennes School of Business
Sabry Shaaban: Sup de Co La Rochelle - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de la Rochelle - Groupe Sup de Co La Rochelle
Abdelkader Sbihi: BBS - Brest business school
Zouhair Laarraf: Sup de Co La Rochelle - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de la Rochelle - Groupe Sup de Co La Rochelle

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Abstract: Unbalanced assembly line research has grown in importance because of its increasing applications in emerging economies, reverse logistics and remanufacturing. This paper examines the performance of numerous simulated patterns for reliable unbalanced manual merging assembly lines. The contribution of this study to the literature is that imbalance does not always negatively impact efficiency and that it can improve merging line performance when compared to a corresponding balanced merging line. The best performance was found to be a balanced line configuration and a monotone decreasing order for both parallel merging lines, with the former generally resulting in a lower throughput and the latter resulting in a lower average buffer level than that of a balanced line.

Keywords: Simulation; throughput; average buffer level; merging lines; unbalanced (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01
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Published in RAIRO - Operations Research, 2021, 55 (1), pp.99-113. ⟨10.1051/ro/2020126⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03182921

DOI: 10.1051/ro/2020126

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