Re-design of manufacturing areas dedicated to heavy and voluminous products

The Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) consists in the assignment of tasks to operators engaged on a line in such a way that the final item is produced with respect to a pre-specified production rate and by optimizing pre-defined objective functions. In literature, a wide variety of algorithms proposing to solve ALBP are found, however almost all of them consider this problem from a mathematical standpoint, hence disregarding details useful for assuring the correct implementation of proposed solutions in real-life environments. Authors have progressively reduced the gap between theory and practice by introducing the stochasticity of operating times, when manual operations are executed, or by describing more and more complex versions of the problem, usually known with the term GALBP (Generalized Assembly Line Balancing Problem), where a wide variety of objective functions and constraints are managed. By following such a research field, in this paper the case of the re-design of a manufacturing area dedicated to the production of heavy and voluminous items is studied, by underlying characteristics and peculiarities of the problem. Specifically, a real-life case study is solved.