Assembly line balancing with work zone and station load time windows constraints

Abstract

This paper presents the solution of a real problem concerning assembly line balancing with several types of incompatibility, and with the constraint that, for a given number of stations, the load of the stations must be located within a time window that is predetermined according to the average load time. The problem is solved by a two-phase heuristic solution procedure: a truncated dynamic programming procedure and an improvement phase, which involves local optimization and tabu search procedures.