INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, cilt.46, ss.329-338, 2010 (SCI-Expanded)
In this paper, a Petri net-based heuristic is presented to solve simple assembly line balancing problem type-II (SALBP-2). Petri net is a mathematical and graphical tool to model and analyze for discrete event systems. SALBP-2 minimizes cycle time for given number of workstations. The presented heuristic determines available tasks and assign task to current workstation by using reachability analysis, one of the main properties of Petri nets, and token movement. Solution of SALBP-2 is implemented by iteratively solving the problem for several trial cycle time. If the cycle time is infeasible for given number of workstations, the heuristic increases the cycle time by a value until finding a feasible solution. To improve the solution, a binary search procedure is implemented between the first feasible solution and the last infeasible solution. Three versions of the heuristic are developed by integrating with forward, backward, and bidirectional procedures. All of them are coded in MATLAB, and their efficiencies are tested on benchmark datasets with 302 instances. Also a comparison study is made with a direct procedure and five heuristics based on differential evolution algorithm. Test and comparison results show that the proposed heuristic obtains good results for SALBP-2. Its performance is superior especially in large assembly lines.