Influence of Time to Walk Back and Comparing for the Self-balancing Production Line

In traditional production lines, such as assembly lines, each worker is usually assigned to a fixed task, which is beneficial since it reduces the amount of training needed for workers to master their assigned tasks. However, when workers complete their tasks at different speeds, the slowest worker will determine the overall pace of the production line and limit production. To avoid this problem, the self-balancing production line was introduced. In this type of production line, each worker works dynamically, thus they can maintain balanced production. Previous research analyzing the performance of these lines has ignored the walk-back time associated with dynamic workers. U-shaped production lines have also been analyzed and policies for such lines have been proposed. However, the walk-back time cannot be ignored in practice, and research taking this factor into account is needed to enable balanced production and thus the maximum production rate. In this paper, we propose production policies for a production line with the walk-back time taken into account, and define and analyze the conditions for self-balancing. Furthermore, we have compared the performance of such a line with that of other production lines under the same conditions, and the results show the superiority of this line in certain cases.