Assembly line balancing problem with quality inspection stations

Assembly lines are popular as production layout since more than 100 years. In the 50ies last century researches started to assign tasks to the workstations with assembly line balancing rules. Since that time we can find thousands of journals and conferences papers which deal with the problem of assembly line balancing (ALBP) in different layouts and with different constraints. Author of this paper study a case from Polish factory. The producer recognized that during the manufacturing process occurs a lot of defects in assembly and the number of sold final products fell down. The engineers added 2 quality inspection stations between workstations of the production line. In the paper influence of structure changes on balance are shown. The results are compared with different quality performances (line efficiency, smoothness index, time of the line). At the end final remarks are presented.