Assembly Line Balancing and Configuration: An Alternative Approach for Design and Planning

One of the most important factors that allows the big enterprises to be competitive in the market is the capability to develop products that are tailored on the specific customer requirements with a short lead-time. This research aims to study an automated configuration tool for assembly lines. A KBE approach was used. The configuration process for an assembly line has been identified with the experts of a big manufacturing Italian company. One of the critical issue is that the domains knowledge is mostly tacit. The implementation stage was carried out with a commercial development tool. Thanks to a modular design of the KBE system a strong but flexible framework was achieved. The rules and data repositories, as well as the code of the single module, can be update easier. An industrial case study was used to validate the proposed approach: the configuration of a cylinder head assembly line was performed.