This paper presents a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model to minimize the stoppage cost of mixed-model assembly lines. Nowadays, most manufacturing firms employ this type of line due to the increasing varieties of products in their attempts to quickly respond to diversified customer demands. Advancement of new technologies, competitiveness, diversification of products, and large customer ...

Assembly line balancing is a very important issue in mass production systems due to production cost. Although many studies have been done on this topic, but because assembly line balancing problems are so complex they are categorized as NP-hard problems and researchers strongly recommend using heuristic methods. This paper presents a new heuristic approach called the critical task method (CTM) ...