SimBa: an approach for manual production lines balancing

The balancing and the comparison between different solutions through the simulation of operation of man based production lines is an important tool to help to decide properly in the level of production planning. This tool becomes much more important in the planning of lines based on variable performance work stations, due to needs of learning, fast changes of operations, which cause frequent bottlenecks and difficulties in previewing the future performance of the production lines. This paper discusses this problem, looking for a solution to perform the line balance and to provide a tool to simulate posterior production to help the production manager to configure the line according to the objective of balancing it.