Heuristic algorithms for a turbine-blade-balancing problem

In the turbine-blade manufacturing industry, turbine-blades are machined and then are assembled to form a cylindrical roll of blades. The roll of blades should be balanced as much as possible, since otherwise the efficiency of the turbine generator might degrade. The turbine-blade balancing problem is known to be NP-hard, thus finding an optimal solution is likely to be computationally intractable for large problems. Several heuristic methods for turbine-blade balancing appeared in the literature. We propose heuristic methods for balancing blades based on the number partitioning algorithm. The proposed methods outperformed existing methods remarkably in terms of the accuracy with a negligible increase in the running time.