Abstract
In manufacturing systems, mixed model assembly lines are used to produce different products to deal with the problem of customers’ demands variety, and minimizing the cycle time in such assembly line is a critical problem. This paper addresses the mixed model assembly line balancing problem type 2 that consists in finding the optimal cycle time for a given number of workstations. A hybrid Greedy randomized adaptive search procedure-Genetic algorithm is proposed to find the optimal assignment of tasks among workstations that minimize the cycle. A Ranked Positional Weight heuristic is used in the construction phase of the proposed GRASP, and in the local search phase, a neighborhood search procedure is used to ameliorate the constructed solutions in the construction phase. The GRASP is executed many times in order to seed the initial population of the proposed genetic algorithm, and the results of the executions are compared with the final solutions obtained by the hybrid GRASP-GA. In order to test the proposed approaches, a numerical example is used.
Highlights
IN production systems, traditional or simple assembly lines are used to fabricate a single product, and from the literature, SALBP for (Simple assembly line balancing problem) is a famous problem that is related to this type of lines including two different versions SALBP-1 and SALPB-2
As shown each solution includes the solution found in the construction phase and its best neighborhood generated by the local search procedure. 8 best solutions (S1, S5, S7, S9, S10, S12, S14, S17) have been found with cycle time (c = 47.5)
All neighborhood solutions found in the 20 executions using GRASP were used as an initial population in the genetic algorithm, and after 100 generations, 8 better solutions (S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S11, S15, S17) have been found with cycle time (c= 45)
Summary
IN production systems, traditional or simple assembly lines are used to fabricate a single product, and from the literature, SALBP for (Simple assembly line balancing problem) is a famous problem that is related to this type of lines including two different versions SALBP-1 and SALPB-2. The variation of market demands increases more and more, to provide models diversity and meet customers’ demands in time, many industrial companies have changed simple assembly lines by another type known by mixed model assembly lines [2]. The difference between models lies in the number of tasks, processing time of each task, precedence tasks relations and the amount of production [4]. According to [6], mixed assembly lines are better than simple assembly lines in terms of product quality, system flexibility and lead time. Mixed model assembly lines are used in several industries including for example furniture and clothing, automobile industries, aerospace industry, refrigerators and washing machines [7, 8]
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