One-dimensional machine location problem with backtracking of jobs on a flow line

In modern manufacturing systems, many flow line production systems have been adopted to raise productivity. Machine location problems play a very important role among these. In this paper, we discuss a one-dimensional machine location problem with the backtracking of jobs. As it is a NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem, it is difficult to obtain the optimal or satisfying solution as the problem size increases. Therefore, a new genetic algorithms approach is developed to deal with the problem. The numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method for this kind of problem.