Teaching Note—Implementing Line Balancing Heuristics in Spreadsheets

Two previous papers in INFORMS Transactions on Education demonstrated an innovative Excel array formula approach that can be used for the handling of precedences in project management and assembly line balancing models. In this paper I combine the array formula approach with a clever but simple precedence coding system to present an efficient spreadsheet for performing assembly line balancing using the heuristic method that is common in operations management textbooks. In addition, I demonstrate to students a perturbation method to handle ties in algorithms in Excel and also demonstrate the application of Excel's Scenario Manager to line balancing.