The impact of the optimal buffer configuration on production line efficiency: A VNS-based solution approach

Abstract

Intelligent design of manufacturing systems is an important research area because it directly affects the profitability of companies and is very costly. Production lines are the most encountered systems in manufacturing and optimal design of production lines is one of the basic research areas for both academy and practitioners. In this study, the buffer allocation problem (BAP), one of the most important optimization problems in designing production lines, is handled and a variable neighborhood search (VNS) based solution approach is proposed to solve the problem with the objectives of throughput maximization and total buffer size minimization. In addition to proposing a new solution approach, two initialization heuristics are employed to enhance the search efficiency. The existing benchmark problems were used to performance evaluation of the proposed approach. The computational study showed that the proposed VNS-based solution approach was highly effective in finding good-quality solutions for all the problem sets examined.