Chapter 10 STABILITY OF OPTIMAL LINE BALANCE WITH GIVEN STATION SET

Abstract: We consider the simple assembly line balancing problem. For an optimal line balance, we investigate its stability with respect to simultaneous independent variations of the processing times of the manual operations. In particular, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions when optimality of a line balance is stable with respect to sufficiently small variations of operation times. We show how to calculate lower and upper bounds for the stability radius, i.e., the maximal value of simultaneous independent variations of operation times with definitely keeping the optimality of line balance. Key words: assembly line balance, stability analysis. 1