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

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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Blum, Christian|||0000-0002-1736-3559
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:97723
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/97723
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Assembly line balancing
Fixed number of work stations
Beam search
Descripción
Sumario: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.