EVALUATION OF ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING METHODS USING AN ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP) AND TECHNIQUE FOR ORDER PREFERENCES BY SIMILARITY TO IDEAL SOLUTION (TOPSIS) BASED APPROACH

Assembly lines are special flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities. In this article, assembly line balancing problem is formulated as a multi objective (criteria) problem where four easily quantifiable objectives (criteria's) are defined. Objectives (criteria's) included are line efficiency, balance delay, smoothness index, and line time. And the value of these objectives is calculated by five different heuristics. In this paper, focus is made on the prioritization of assembly line balancing (ALB) solution methods (heuristics) and to select the best of them. For this purpose, a bench mark assembly line balancing problem is solved by five different heuristics and the value of objectives criteria's (performance measures) of the line is determined. Finally the prioritization of heuristics is carried out through the use of AHP-TOPSIS based approach by solving an example.