Some new ideas for assembly line balancing research

International audienceThe design of assembly lines is an important issue in manufacturing engineering,management and control. The idle time is the most interesting performance index for assemblyline design. The classical simple line-balancing problem (SALBP) consists of assigning tasks,necessary for processing a product, to workstations such that the idle time (number of stations,cycle time, cost) is minimized while precedence constraints between tasks are satisfied. Fromthe worst-case analysis point of view, the SALBP problems are NP-hard in strong sense.Nevertheless, in practice, it is also important to be able to compare real instances of SALBP.In this paper, the simple assembly line balancing problem of type 1 (SALBP-1) is consideredwhere the cycle time is fixed and the objective is to minimize the number of stations. Twounconventional ways are proposed to help to estimate the complexity of such a probleminstances: reduction of the graph of precedence constraints to planar one and transformationof the problem to a problem of maximization. We show how these techniques can be employedand why they are useful to analysis of assembly line balancing problem instances