Rule-Based Modeling of Assembly Constraints for Line Balancing

The assembly line balancing problem employs traditional precedence diagrams to model precedence relations among assembly tasks. Yet they cannot address alternative ways of assembling a product. That is, they only model conjunctions (AND relations), not disjunctions (OR relations). However, there may be some alternative assembly plans for a product. Moreover, some complicated constraints need also to be considered, but these constraints cannot be modeled effectively through traditional precedence diagrams. This paper proposes a rule-based representation to address these issues. The rule-base alone can model any constraint effectively. The paper also shows that the rule-base can easily be employed by heuristics used for line balancing problems