Assembly industry plays a key role in Central and Eastern Europe. Large companies and their subcontractors manufacture automotive and electronic products from components, employing a significant number of human resources. Due to the growing labor shortage, it is critical that the production lines should be optimally loaded, i.e., the tasks have to be evenly distributed among the workstations according to their cycle times. In this article a novel formulation of the problem by process graphs or P-graphs is presented leading in an easy to follow visual definition of the potential task to employee allocations, as well as the options to generate a mathematical programming model algorithmically, to be solved by general purpose solvers or get the optimal and alternative N-best allocations by P-graph software. In addition to the theoretical presentation, the article shows the results achieved by applying the proposed methodology in a real-world environment in a computer assembly plant. The P-graph approach provides visual modeling by graphs in a graphical editor and helps understand the relations of decision variables while generating the corresponding mathematical model, which can be generalized for a class of problems and rebuilt according to actual data. As a result, the basis for rigorous mathematical optimization-based decision support can be built up according to graphical models easily understandable by end users as well.

中文翻译：

---

通过P图平衡生产线

装配行业在中欧和东欧起着关键作用。大型公司及其分包商使用大量人力资源从零部件制造汽车和电子产品。由于不断增加的劳动力短缺，至关重要的是，应该优化生产线的负荷，即，必须根据工作站的周期时间在工作站之间平均分配任务。在本文中，通过过程图或P图对问题进行了新颖的表述，从而可以轻松地对员工分配的潜在任务进行直观​​定义，并提供了可以通过算法生成数学规划模型的选项由通用求解器获得或获得最优的替代N-通过P-graph软件进行的最佳分配。除理论介绍外，本文还介绍了通过在计算机组装厂的实际环境中应用建议的方法所获得的结果。P-graph方法通过图形化编辑器中的图形提供可视化建模，并有助于理解决策变量之间的关系，同时生成相应的数学模型，可以将其概括为一类问题，并根据实际数据进行重建。结果，可以根据最终用户容易理解的图形模型来建立基于数学优化的严格决策支持的基础。