This paper describes the application of tabu search, a recent heuristic technique for combinatorial optimization problems, to the assembly line balancing problems. Computational experiments with different search strategies have been performed for some assembly ine problems from literature. Computational results show that except for few cases tabu search always finds optimal solutions.

This paper focuses on production systems that consist of multiple parallel assembly lines. The main literature contributions are briefly described and used to present a summary of the state of the art. The advantages and disadvantages of adopting multiple lines are discussed and the multiple assembly line balancing problem and its relevant characteristics are

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...

Many real life problems contain imprecise variables, constraints and objectives. Fuzzy set theory gives an opportunity to handle imprecise terms in such situations. Two-sided assembly line balancing (2sALB) problem which is a generalization of the well known simple assembly line balancing problem can also be modeled more realistically by employing fuzzy approaches. Such an approach is presented...

The objective of assembly line balancing (ALB) is to minimize the number of workstations organized to perform tasks with precedence constraints. An important element of proper assignment of tasks to workstations is the consideration of skill requirement of tasks, and skill level of workers. Some tasks may require special skills, some workers might not be able to perform complicated tasks, and s...