Two bi-directional heuristics for the assembly line type II problem

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed two heuristic algorithms for solving the assembly line balancing type II problem. The proposed algorithms first generate an initial solution by a bi-directional assignment procedure, then the obtained initial solution is further improved by swapping tasks among workstations. In order to test the performance of the two algorithms, a comparison is carried out on a set of 302 instances found in the literature and a set of 1440 randomly generated instances. The computational results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms for solving the assembly line balancing Type II problem are efficient in minimizing both the cycle time and the mean absolute deviation.