An improved mathematical program to solve the simple assembly line balancing problem

Rafael Pastor (1) , Laia Ferrer (1)

1 IOC Research Institute

The Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP) has been extensively examined in the literature. Various mathematical programs have been developed to solve SALBP type-1 (minimizing the number of workstations, m, for a given cycle time, ct) and SALBP type-2 (minimizing ct given m). Usually, an initial pre-process is carried out to calculate the range of workstations to which a task i may be assigned, in order to reduce the number of variables of task-workstation assignment. This paper presents a more effective mathematical program than those released to date to solve SALBP-1 and SALBP-2. The key idea is to introduce additional constraints in the mathematical program, based on the fact that the range of workstations to which a task i may be assigned depends either on the upper bound on the number of workstations or on the upper bound on the cycle time (for SALBP-1 and SALBP-2, respectively). A computational experiment was carried out and the results reveal the superiority of the mathematical program proposed.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Rafael Pastor, Laia Ferrer. An improved mathematical program to solve the simple assembly line balancing problem. International Journal of Production Research, 2009, 47 (11), pp.2943-2959. ⟨10.1080/00207540701713832⟩. ⟨hal-00513010⟩