Assembly line balancing problems with multi-manned stations: a new mathematical formulation and Gantt based heuristic method

This paper addresses an assembly line balancing problem in which each station is allowed to have more than one worker, with minimization of two objectives: (i) the number of workers used in the line and (ii) the number of stations opened in the line. Each station has an own workpiece, and workers at the same station simultaneously perform different assembly tasks on its workpiece. For solving the balancing problem of these lines, a new mixed integer programming formulation is presented, and then a simulated annealing based heuristic method is proposed. The new formulation requires less number of variables and constraints. The basic property of the proposed heuristic is that it is directly applied to Gantt representations of problem's solutions. Moreover, the paper includes some important neighborhood generation properties for Gantt representations of solutions. Both methods are compared with existing methods available in the literature. Experimental study indicates that the proposed methods can yield promising results.