Partie I. Cas monocritère

Abstract

In this paper we consider a transfer line balancing and equipment selection problem. The considered lines consist of several workstations in series. Each workstation can contain one or more multi-spindle heads. All tasks of each spindle head are executed in parallel. We take into account the constraints related to the impossibility of combining some spindles heads at the same workstation and the precedence constraints among the tasks. Our objective is to carry out the assignment of tasks to spindle heads and spindle heads to workstations minimizing the total equipment cost. For this problem, we propose a B&B algorithm. For large scale problems, we developed a heuristic based on a branching (exploration) strategy and Genetic Algorithm. The suggested exact and approximate algorithms give some interesting results.