Purpose: In this paper, a combined Production Line Design (PLD) process which includes many design aspects is presented, developped and validated.Design/methodology/approach: The PLD process is based on the SADT (Structured Analysis and Design Technique) diagram and the Axiomatic Design (AD) method.Practical implications: For a purpose of validation, this proposed process has been applied in a manufacturing company and it has been validated by simulation.Findings: The results of the validation indicated that the production line designed by this process is outperformed the initial line of the company.Originality/value: Recently, the problems of production line design (PLD) have attracted the attention of many researchers. However, only a few studies have treated the PLD which includes all design aspects. In this work, a combined PLD porcess is presented. It should be noted that the proposed process is simple and effective.

In this paper, an Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) is presented in a real-world automotive cables manufacturer company. This company found it necessary to balance its line, since it needs to increase the production rate. In this ALBP, the number of stations is known and the objective is to minimize cycle time where both precedence and zoning constrains must be satisfied. This problem is formulated as a binary linear program (BLP). Since this problem is NP-hard, an innovative Genetic Algorithm (GA) is implemented. The full factorial design is used to obtain the better combination GA parameters and a simple convergence experimental study is performed on the stopping criteria to reduce computational time. Comparison of the proposed GA results with CPLEX software shows that, in a reasonable time, the GA generates consistent solutions that are very close to their optimal ones. Therefore, the proposed GA approach is very effective and competitive.