Metaheuristic procedures for the lexicographic bottleneck assembly line balancing problem

Abstract

The goal of this work is to develop an improved procedure for the solution of the lexicographic bottleneck variant of the assembly line balancing problem (LB-ALBP). The objective of the LB-ALBP is to minimize the workload of the most heavily loaded workstation, followed by the workload of the second most heavily loaded workstation and so on. This problem -recently introduced to the literature (Pastor 2011)-has practical relevance to manufacturing facilities. We design, implement and fine-tune GRASP, tabu search and scatter search heuristics for the LB-ALBP and show that our procedures are able to obtain solutions of a quality that outperforms previous approaches. We rely on both semi-greedy and memory-based designs that our experiments show to be effective. Experimental results verify the advantages of embedding such designs to improve the solution existing in the literature of this complex problem. Additionally, the extensive experimentation with 48 variants of GRASP, 12 of tabu search and 1 of scatter search establishes the benefits of adding enhanced search strategies to basic procedures.

A mathematical model and artificial bee colony algorithm for the lexicographic bottleneck mixed-model assembly line balancing problem

“…Pastor et al (2012) proposed and tested new algorithms which were different combinations of a heuristic procedure and several local search procedures derived from different line balancing procedures. Recently, Pastor et al (2015) employed GRASP, scatter search and tabu search for solving the LB-ALBP and compared their performance to each other, on the basis of well-known test problems. The authors reported that the GRASP and scatter search integrated with an improvement method reached better solutions than the best heuristic that was proposed by Pastor et al (2012).…”

An Algorithm for Arranging Operators to Balance Assembly Lines and Reduce Operator Training Time

“…Kim et al [7] suggested a mathematically mixed integer programming model that accounts for the WIP balance and setup time in a semiconductor fabrication line. Maximum productivity and minimum load smoothness are benefits of solving the assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) [8,9]. Many types of production lines exist.…”