A Problem-Solving Environment to Teach Students Assembly Line Balancing Techniques

Assembly line balancing is a production planning strategy that has been widely used in industrial applications.Most line balancing problems are known as nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-hard) problem, and theyhave different structures and solution methodology approaches. In this study, newly developed productionplanning software which is called Visual Assembly Line Balancing Software (VALBS) is introduced foreducational purposes. The aim of the software is to support teaching activity for assembly line balancingtechniques; facilitate understanding characteristics of different assembly lines and solution approaches, andenable to compare the results of them. The proposed VALBS is easy to use in various manufacturingenvironments, and suitable to support teaching line balancing procedures in undergraduate students. Thesoftware was used in classes of industrial and mechanical engineering students and feedbacks of studentsmeasured by Likert Scale survey. The results show that proposed visual software is an effective method to teachline balancing procedures.