On a learning precedence graph concept for the automotive industry

Hanne Klindworth, Christian Otto () and Armin Scholl ()
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Christian Otto: School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

No 09/2010, Jena Research Papers in Business and Economics - Working and Discussion Papers (Expired!) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, School of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist in assigning the total workload for manufacturing a product to stations of an assembly line as typically applied in automotive industry. The distribution of the tasks to the stations is due to restrictions which can be expressed in a precedence graph. However, automotive manufacturers usually do not know complete precedence graphs describing the production processes of their models. Unfortunately, the known approaches for graph generation are not suitable for the conditions in the automotive industry. We describe a new graph generation approach that is based on learning from past production sequences and forms a sufficient precedence graph. This graph, indeed, restricts the ALBP instance but guarantees feasible line balances. Computational experiments indicate that the proposed procedure is able to approximate the real precedence graph sufficiently well to detect optimal or nearly optimal solutions for all instances of a benchmark data set. So, the new approach is applicable and effective and might be a major step to close the gap between theoretical line balancing research and practice of assembly line planning.

Keywords: assembly; line balancing; auto industry; manufacturing process; precedence graph; learning approach; decision support (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
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Published in: European Journal of Operational Research 217/2 (2012), 259-269.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2011.09.024 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: On a learning precedence graph concept for the automotive industry (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jen:jenjbe:2010-09

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