This paper discusses the U-shaped assembly line balancing problem in case of stochastic processing time. The problem is formulated using chance-constrained programming and the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure is used to solve the problem. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, 71 problems taken from well-known benchmarks are solved and compared with the theoretical lower bound and 13 of them were compared with another approach used to solve the same problem in another paper, which is beam search. The results show that 59 problems are the same as the theoretical aspiration lower bound. In addition, the results of 11 of 13 problems compared with beam search are the same and the results of 2 problems are better than beam search. The t-test statistics is applied and showed that there is no significance difference between the proposed algorithm and the theoretical lower bound thus, the proposed algorithm shows efficiency when compared with the aspired values of the theoretical lower bound.
The U-shaped assembly lines help to have more flexibility than the straight assembly lines, where the operators can perform tasks in both sides of the line, the entrance and the exit sides. Having more than one operator in any station of the line can reduce the line length and thereby affects the number of produced products. This paper combines the U-shaped assembly line balancing problem with the multi-manned assembly line balancing problem in one problem. In addition, the processing times of the tasks are considered as stochastic, where they are represented as random variables with known means and variances. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming and the cycle time constraints are formulated as chance-constraints. The proposed algorithm for solving the problem is a differential evolution algorithm. The parameter of the algorithm is optimized using experimental design and the computational results are done on 71 adapted problems selected from well-known benchmarks.
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