Metaheuristics based on Bin Packing for the line balancing problem

The line balancing problem consists in assigning tasks to stations in order to respect precedence constraints and cycle time constraints. In this paper, the cycle time is fixed and the objective is to minimize the number of stations. We propose to use metaheuristics based on simulated annealing by exploiting the link between the line balancing problem and the bin packing problem. The principle of the method lies in the combination between a metaheuristic and a bin packing heuristic. Two representations of a solution and two neighboring systems are proposed and the methods are compared with results from the literature. They are better or similar to tabu search based algorithm.