An assembly system consists of work stations where specific tasks are carried in such a way that last station gives the complete product. An assembly line balancing Problem (ALBP) involves optimally assigning tasks among workstations with respect to some performance objective. ALBP problems are of NP hard nature and in literature; many efforts are there to solve the problem efficiently through heuristics. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm for solving type 2 ALBP for single objective optimization. The proposed algorithm assigns tasks to a fixed no of stations with objective of minimizing cycle time. In literature, type 2 ALBP is mostly solved through Type 1 problem. However, this paper proposes a direct approach to Type 2 ALBP. The effectiveness is tested through application on Gunther problem of 35 tasks with forty five precedence constraints. The task assignment for six stations is computed and it shows competitive performance. The number of fixed stations is varied and corresponding cycle times are computed. The algorithm is also tested on a real industrial problem of 24 tasks. The experimental testing indicates tendency of the proposed algorithm to give effective optimal results.
