Cost-oriented two-sided assembly line balancing problem: A simulated annealing approach

Two-sided assembly line balancing problems usually occur in plants producing large-sized high-volume products such as automobiles, buses or trucks. The difference between these kinds of assembly lines and traditional assembly lines is that there is the possibility of installing two parallel single stations in each position of the line so that the workers can work simultaneously on different tasks of one same product. In this paper, the cost-oriented two-sided assembly line balancing problem is addressed. This kind of assembly line balancing problem usually occurs in final assembly of products in which the manufacturing process is very labour intensive. A mix integer programming is proposed to solve the problem optimally. Since the problem is well known as NP (nondeterministic polynomial-time)-hard, a heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing approach is developed to solve the medium-and large-size scales of this problem. Through computational experiments, the performance of the proposed heuristic approach is examined. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.