Balancing and sequencing of assembly lines is the process of partitioning the assembly work into operations and to assign and schedule them to workstations in an optimal way. In particular, in response to highly competitive market conditions, manufacturers face the problem of producing several models of a base product on the assembly line, leading to a mixed-model assembly line balancing problem. This problem is proven to be NPhard and is thus computationally challenging. In this study, we tackle the mixed model assembly line problem, but additionally, we consider sequence dependant setup times between operations. We present an approach based on simulated annealing, which focuses on finding good permutations of the operations, using simple neighbourhood moves and α-Sampling. Using an efficient assignment heuristic, the operations are mapped to workstations in a greedy fashion. We conducted experiments on a range of instances, and we find that simulated annealing is more effective than a mixed integer programming model, by finding solutions to large problems in short time-frames. Furthermore, for a large number of problem instances, simulated annealing outperforms ant colony optimisation.
History
Pagination
2762-2769
Location
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
Start date
2020-12-01
End date
2020-12-04
ISBN-13
9781728125473
Language
eng
Publication classification
E1 Full written paper - refereed
Title of proceedings
SSCI 2020 : Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence
Event
Computational Intelligence. Symposium (2020 : Canberra, Australian Capital Territory))