This paper presents an approach, based on ant techniques, to effectively address the assembly line balancing problem with the complicating factors of parallel workstations, stochastic task durations, and mixed-models. A methodology was inspired by the behavior of social insects in an attempt to distribute tasks among workers so that strategic performance measures are optimized. This methodology...

SALBP is an NP-hard problem. There are some measures proposed to grasp the difficulty of SALBP. Order Strength, Flexibility Ratio and West Ratio all of which are based on SALBP precedence networks are among them. This study investigates the sensitivity of difficulty of SALBP type 2 to the three measures. A SALBP solver is created in Python programming language. Computational experiments are con...

this research presents a new application of the cloud theory-based simulated annealing algorithm to solve mixed model assembly line sequencing problems where line stoppage cost is expected to be optimized. this objective is highly significant in mixed model assembly line sequencing problems based on just-in-time production system. moreover, this type of problem is np-hard and solving this probl...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the work stations along a manufacturing line as used in the automotive or the electronics industries. Usually, it is assumed that the production process is fixed, i.e., has been determined in a preceding planning step. However, this sequential plann...

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical optimization technique of the PCB assembly line including multi-head non-identical surface mounting machines. The optimization problem related to the PCB assembly line is generally divided into three sub-problems: a line balancing problem, a reel assignment problem and a pick-and-place sequencing problem. Since each problem is known to be combinatorial a...

Most of the decision support systems for balancing industrial assembly lines are designed to report a huge number of possible line configurations, according to several criteria. In this contribution, we tackle a more realistic variant of the classical assembly line problem formulation, time and space assembly line balancing. Our goal is to study the influence of incorporating user preferences b...

The classical Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP) has been widely enriched over the past few years with many realistic approaches and much effort has been made to reduce the distance between the academic theory and the industrial reality. Despite this effort, the scheduling of the execution of tasks assigned to every workstation following the balancing of the assembly line has been s...