Balancing of Transfer Lines with Simultaneously Activated Spindles

Abstract A balancing problem for transfer lines with parallel spindles is investigated. All spindle heads of the same workstation are activated simultaneously. The relations of the necessity of executing some operations at the same workstation, the possibility of combining the spindles at the same workstation as well as precedence constraints are given. The problem is to choose spindle heads from a given set and allocate them to workstations in such a way that i) all the operations are performed, ii) all constraints are satisfied, iii) the cycle time is provided, and iv) the line cost is minimal. The proposed method for solving the problem is based on its formulation as a mixed integer problem (MIP).