Improving the solvability of time and space constrained assembly line balancing problems type E

Within the assembly line balancing problem type-E, tasks are assigned to workstations while minimization the product of workstation number and maximum time required by any station. To overcome some of the practical limitations of the model, we additionally incorporate space related considerations. However, the main contributions of this work is the use of various greedy heuristics and bounds which enables the formulation of valid inequalities and preprocessing steps. Furthermore, we propose lazy constraints and regular cuts to improve the solution procedure to this problem. Our solution procedure is tested on an established benchmark dataset and compared to previous results.

Publication year:2019