According to a simple survey on the current status of the assembly line design, it was found that trial and error methods on the basis of experiences have been used mainly in domestic manufacturing industries, even though there exist a lot of excellent line balancing studies. It seems that more practical researches should be carried out to develop user-oriented line balancing tools especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. This study presents a design of the line balancing tool which can support the line balancing tasks of nonspecialists. The proposed design tool is composed of three major modules: pre-process, line balancing, and post-process. In particular, pre-process and post-process are newly proposed to increase its ease of use. We applied the proposed design to a test problem and test result showed that our practical method may contribute to enhance the efficiency of production operations management.

In this thesis, we surveyed the current status of production operations management to find how to improve the operations efficiency. From the survey research, we have found that practical software tools should be developed to increase the efficiency of production operations management, especially for small and mediumsized enterprises. Although there exist a lot of excellent line balancing researches, the results of our survey represent that trial and error methods on the basis of experiences have been used mainly used in the domestic manufacturing industry. It seems that more practical researches should be carried out to develop user-oriented line balancing tools. As a part of the development of those tools, this thesis proposed a design of the line balancing tool which can support the line balancing tasks of nonspecialists. The proposed design is composed of three major phases: redundancy check of the precedence diagram, line balancing, and modification of the line balancing results. The first phase is to check the precedence diagram of work elements and remove the redundancy. The redundancy may affect the quality of solutions and computational time. Although it is important to prepare a neat and proper precedence data, it is not easy to develop a tidy precedence diagram for laymen. The first phase automatically removes the overlapped data. The next phase is the line balancing algorithm. The proposed algorithm is based on COMSOAL and can solve minimization of the number of work stations given the target production cycle time and minimization of the production cycle time given the number of work stations. Additionally, our suggested method can accommodate the predetermined location constraints. The third phase is to modify the solution suggested by the second phase. Frequently, users may want to change the result to reflect some constraints which were not easy to be included into the line balancing algorithm. So, a practical line balancing tool should provide mechanisms to modify the solution and they should check the precedence violation while a user tries to change the work station of an element. This research suggested a simple mechanism to check the precedence violation. We applied the proposed design to some test problems and test results showed that it performed successfully. Therefore, our method may contribute to enhance the efficiency of production operations management.