Combinatorial Benders cuts for assembly line balancing problems with setups

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AKPINAR Ş., Elmi A., Bektas T.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH, vol.259, no.2, pp.527-537, 2017 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 259 Issue: 2
  • Publication Date: 2017
  • Doi Number: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.11.001
  • Journal Name: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.527-537
  • Keywords: Combinatorial optimization, Type-I assembly line balancing problem, Sequence-dependent setup times, Benders decomposition, Combinatorial Benders cuts
  • Open Archive Collection: AVESIS Open Access Collection
  • Dokuz Eylül University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

The classical assembly line balancing problem consists of assigning assembly work to workstations. In the presence of setup times that depend on the sequence of tasks assigned to each workstation, the problem becomes more complicated given that two interdependent problems, namely assignment and sequencing, must be solved simultaneously. The hierarchical nature of these two problems also suggest a natural decomposition of the problem. This paper adopts such an approach and describes an exact algorithm based on Benders decomposition to solve both simple and mixed-model assembly line balancing problems with setups. The algorithm is tested on a set of benchmark instances and numerically compared against a mixed-integer linear programming formulation of the problem solved using a commercial optimizer. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.