Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has arisen as a promising technology to improve the productivity of assembly processes. This paper discusses an assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) where manual, robotic, or HRC operations may be considered decision alternatives. Each assembly process task may be operated either by a human operator, a robot operator, or an HRC. This possibility of shared functions between humans and robots may result in a hybrid manual-robotic assembly line. This problem’s mathematical model is developed based on the simple ALBP and modifying the idea of two-sided ALBP, with additional aspects related to resource alternatives of human, robot, or HRC, and robot’s tool-type for the operations. The problem is formulated analytically in a mixed-integer linear programming model with a cost-oriented objective function. The exact method can be applied to obtain an optimal solution.
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