Description
Much academic energy has been invested in the study of optimizing assembly or production lines. The Assembly Line Balancing Problem design problem is an artifact of that work. Theory of Constraints purports that an assembly line that is purposely and strategically unbalanced provides superior performance in terms of predictability and throughput over the traditional balanced line. This study articulates a custom production line model based on Theory of Constraints and compares its performance to the traditional operations management paradigm, a balanced line. Results show that a purposely unbalanced line provides superior flow of material and greater throughput than the traditional balanced line configuration. Additionally the simplified model and approach may be more appealing with respect to the design, development, and computational costs than those required of the conventional line balancing methodologies.
