Scheduling mixed-model final assembly lines in JIT manufacturing

This paper reports on a new approach to applying simulated annealing to a class of mixed-model sequencing problems. Two major problems are considered: (1) minimizing of actual workload from the ideal workload on the assembly lines; (2) minimizing required set-ups on the assembly lines. The approaches that are found to perform the best are extended for the bicriteria problem considering problems 1 and 2. The sequencing of mixed-model assembly lines in a just-in-time (JIT) production environment is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. The main purpose of this paper is to use the simulated annealing methodology to schedule JIT production lines. The performance of the proposed method is tested on several problems from the literature and is compared with optimal solutions found so far. Finally, it is shown that solutions obtained by the proposed method are superior to the formal optimal solution. The performance of the method is numerically tested on a standard problem.