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A late acceptance hill-climbing algorithm for balancing two-sided assembly lines with multiple constraints

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Abstract

Two-sided assembly lines are widely applied to produce the large-sized high-volume products, such as buses and trucks. Balancing the lines is a vital design problem for the industries, and the problem is NP-hard. Besides the fundamental constraints of the conventional line balancing problem, some specific constraints may occur in the two-sided assembly line problem, including the zoning constraints, the positional constraints, and the synchronism constraints, which make the problem more complex. In this paper, an integer programming (IP) model is constructed and solved for the two-sided assembly line balancing problem which contains the above three constraints. A novel metaheuristic named late acceptance hill-climbing (LAHC) is also proposed to solve the problem effectively. The proposed algorithm is tested on several sets of instances. The computational results of the LAHC algorithm are compared with those of IP and the lower bounds of the instances. The experiment validates the effectiveness of the LAHC algorithm.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank anonymous referees whose comments helped a lot to improve this paper. This research work is supported by the State Key Program of National Natural Science of China (Grant No. 51035001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51275190).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Biao Yuan

  2. State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China

    Chaoyong Zhang & Xinyu Shao

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  1. Biao Yuan
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  2. Chaoyong Zhang
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Correspondence to Chaoyong Zhang.

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Yuan, B., Zhang, C. & Shao, X. A late acceptance hill-climbing algorithm for balancing two-sided assembly lines with multiple constraints. J Intell Manuf 26, 159–168 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-013-0770-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-013-0770-x

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