Assembly line balancing by using axiomatic design principles: An application from cooler manufacturing industry

The philosophy of production without waste is the fundamental belief behind lean manufacturing that should be adopted by enterprises. One of the waste elimination methods is assembly line balancing for lean manufacturing, i.e. Yamazumi. The assembly line balancing is to assign tasks to the workstations by minimizing the number of workstations to the required values. There should be no workstation with the excessively high or low workload, and all workstations must ideally work with balanced workloads. Accordingly, in this study, the axiomatic design method is applied for assembly line balancing in order to achieve maximum output with the installed capacity. In order to achieve this aim, all improvement opportunities are defined and utilized as an output of the study. Computational results indicate that the proposed method is effective to reduce operators’ idle time by 12%, imbalance workload between workstations by 38%, and the total number of workers by 12%. As a result of these improvements, the production volume is increased by 23%.