An Approach to Line Balancing on Virtual Supervisor Induction Method and Intelligent Agents

This approach develops a method for solving the line-balancing problem, which is based on two stages. The works in a first stage is to identify the task of workstation, the assignment of the tasks to stations on the line and the recognized balance delay. In this stage we propose the induction VS method, which allows further identify the exact position between pieces, machine into a workstation and also between extern workstation, as well as intracellular and intercellular part. This way each task is identified and measured. In the second stage is to carry out a macro-approach to choose the resource to perform each of them. The hybrid intelligent agent architecture is proposed for this second stage, which has consideration of machining sequence. The integration between both technologies allows us to develop new hybrid architecture capable to reduce the computational time in the deliberative layers fundamentally. Finally, a reconfigurable testbed has been proposed for future experiments and results to evaluate this new balancing method. Some previous computational experiments provide that the proposed approach is efficient to solve practical transfer line design for balancing problem