A Greedy Randomized Heuristic for U-Shaped Assembly Line Balancing

Abstract

Many manufacturers have adopted a Just-in-time (JIT) approach to manufacturing in recent year. One of the important changes resulting from JIT implementation is the replacement of the traditional straight lines with U-shaped production lines. The important characteristic of these new configurations is that multiskilled workers perform various tasks of different stations along the production line. On the other hand, the problem of assigning tasks on a U-line configuration is more complex than the straight line. This paper addresses the U-shaped assembly line balancing problem type I (UALBP-1; the number of workstations is minimized for a given cycle time) using a constructive heuristic. To measure performance of the heuristic, it is applied to solve a large number of benchmark problems. The results are compared with the optimal solutions and other heuristics obtained from the previous published research. The results indicate that the proposed heuristic is able to identify better solutions and performs efficiently.