Line Balancing (LB) is a classic, well-researched Operations Research (OR) optimization problem of significant industrial importance. It is one of those problems where domain expertise does not help very much: whatever the number of years spent solving it, one is each time facing an intractable problem with an astronomic number of possible solutions and no real guidance on how to solve it in th...

We propose the Assembly Line Worker Integration and Balancing Problem (ALWIBP), a new assembly line balancing problem arising in lines with conventional and disabled workers. The goal of this problem is to maintain high productivity levels by minimizing the number of workstations needed to reach a given output, while including in the assembly line a number of disabled workers. This problem gain...

In this paper, the metaheuristic method consisting of the adaptive tabu search (ATS) and the practicing heuristic (PH) technique is proposed to provide optimal solutions of the assembly line balancing (ALB) problems. With the multi-objective approach, the ATS is used to address the number of tasks assigned for each workstation, while the PH is conducted to assign the sequence of tasks for each ...

Assembly line balancing concerns the design of assembly lines for the manufacturing of products. In this paper we consider the time and space constrained simple assembly line balancing problem with the objective of minimizing the number of necessary work stations. This problem is denoted by TSALBP-1 in the literature. For tackling this problem we propose a Beam-ACO approach, which is an algorit...