Robust assembly line balancing with heterogeneous workers

Robust assembly line balancing with heterogeneous workers

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Article ID: iaor201527516
Volume: 88
Issue: 4
Start Page Number: 254
End Page Number: 263
Publication Date: Oct 2015
Journal: Computers & Industrial Engineering
Authors: , , ,
Keywords: scheduling, combinatorial optimization, heuristics
Abstract:

Assembly lines are manufacturing systems in which a product is assembled progressively in workstations by different workers or machines, each executing a subset of the needed assembly operations (or tasks). We consider the case in which task execution times are worker‐dependent and uncertain, being expressed as intervals of possible values. Our goal is to find an assignment of tasks and workers to a minimal number of stations such that the resulting productivity level respects a desired robust measure. We propose two mixed‐integer programming formulations for this problem and explain how these formulations can be adapted to handle the special case in which one must integrate a particular set of workers in the assembly line. We also present a fast construction heuristic that yields high quality solutions in just a fraction of the time needed to solve the problem to optimality. Computational results show the benefits of solving the robust optimization problem instead of its deterministic counterpart.

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