TABLE OF CONTENTS We may not know it, but assembly lines have had a major impact on our everyday lives by lowering costs and making products more affordable. We wear, use, breathe, and drive products made in assembly lines. Assembly lines were first made popular by Henry Ford, making the now famous Model-T Ford automobile affordable to the general population. Since then, assembly lines have been utilized to manufacture a wide variety of goods, ranging from small watches to large boats. This chapter will discuss the definition of assembly lines, methods of assembly line balancing, software, and other related advanced features.
Assembly lines can be defined as a series of manual or automated assembly workstations through which one or multiple product(s) are sequentially assembled. A broader definition of assembly lines includes flow lines, with or without buffers between workstations for manufacturing and assembly. Assembly lines form the backbone of mass production methodologies and are the basis for a product flow layout. For assembly line analyses, and to realize the efficiencies of mass production, we assume that the line is synchronous [i.e., partially assembled products within the assembly line leave each workstation synchronously (or at the same time)].
Manufacturing and assembly tasks can usually be decomposed into...
