Optimal buffer allocation in production lines

Abstract

The optimal allocation of buffers in production lines is an important research issue in the design of a manufacturing system. We present a new hybrid algorithm for this complex design problem: the hybrid Nested Partitions (NP) and Tabu Search (TS) method. The Nested Partitions method is globally convergent and can utilize many of the existing heuristic methods to speed up its convergence. In this paper, we incorporate the Tabu Search heuristic into the NP framework and demonstrate through numerical examples that using the hybrid method results in superior solutions. Our numerical results illustrate that the new algorithm is very efficient for buffer allocation problems in large production lines.