A report on "Industrial Assembly Lines with Multi-operated Workstations: Applications and Methods"

This report summarises Adalberto Sato Michels' PhD thesis, which made theoretical and practical advances to industrial assembly lines in the automotive sector. Three combinatorial problems were examined: the Robotic Assembly Line Design and two Multi-manned Assembly Line Balancing Problem variants. The need for intelligent manufacturing emerges in close relation to optimally solving these problems: consciously designing an efficient line is costly because building vehicles employs several workers or robots with diversified tools, facilities, and equipment. We developed Mixed-Integer Linear Programming models and innovative Benders' Decomposition Algorithms to minimise total costs at the desired production rate or the cycle time under limited resources. This study included practical characteristics, computational tests, and real-world robotic welding line case studies. Our methods outperformed previous state-of-the-art approaches, and contributions were published in the field's renowned journals. Therefore, we present the referred thesis as a candidate to the LIII Brazilian Operational Research Symposium Best Thesis Award.