Iterative beam search for simple assembly line balancing with a fixed number of work stations

作者：Blum Christian^*

来源：Statistics and Operations Research Transactions, 2011, 35(2): 145-164.

• Assembly line balancing
• fixed number of work stations
• beam search

The simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP) concerns the assignment of tasks with pre-defined processing times to work stations that are arranged in a line. Hereby, precedence constraints between the tasks must be respected. The optimization goal of the SALBP-2 variant of the problem concerns the minimization of the so-called cycle time, that is, the time in which the tasks of each work station must be completed. In this work we propose to tackle this problem with an iterative search method based on beam search. The proposed algorithm is able to generate optimal solutions, respectively the best upper bounds, for 283 out of 302 test cases. Moreover, for 9 further test cases the algorithm is able to improve the currently best upper bounds. These numbers indicate that the proposed iterative beam search algorithm is currently a state-of-the-art method for the SALBP-2.

• 出版日期2011-12