"Reducing the Number of Workstations and Increasing the Overall Efficiency of an Existing Assembly Line Using New Heuristic Method Based on CPM"

In mass production systems, line balancing plays a great role but this is not easy even for simple straight line. Therefore utilizing heuristic strategies for these issues is completely desirable. Moreover, in line balancing, heuristic methods are the base of the metaheuristic methods, so it's necessary to use more efficient heuristic methods. This research work presents a new heuristic method based on (CPM) critical path method for simple assembly line balancing. This research is concerned with objectives of minimizing the number of workstations, improving smoothness index, increasing line efficiency and improving mean absolute deviation (MAD). A comparison is done between this new heuristic method and three popular heuristic methods. FLB software based on COMSOAL is also used to compare the results.