Browsing by Subject "Assembly-line balancing."

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    Ant colony optimization for the single model U-type assembly line balancing problem
    (2004) Alp, Arda
    The assembly line is a production line in which units move continuously through a sequence of stations. The assembly line balancing problem is the allocation of tasks to an ordered sequence of stations subject to the precedence constraints with the objective of minimizing the number of stations. In a U-line the line is configured into a U-shape topology. In this research, a new heuristic, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic, and its variants are proposed for the single model U-type assembly line balancing problem (UALBP). We develop a number of algorithms that can be grouped as: (i) direct methods, (ii) modified methods and (iii) methods in which ACO approach is augmented with some metaheuristic. We also construct an extensive experimental study and compare the performance of the proposed algorithms against the procedures reported in the literature.
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    Assembly line balancing problem: Comparison of some heuristic procedures
    (1989) Mete, Hasan Ali
    Assembly line balancing problem can be defined as assigning tasks to an ordered sequence of stations, such that the precedence relations among the tasks are satisfied and some pel- hormarice measure (e.g. toLal idle tune; is opLimized- in this work, some heuristic methods are examined and compared for an 11-element assembly line balancing problem for fixed F-ratios and cycle times. The results of the experiments show that there is no significant difference between the four selected heuristic procedures.
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    Balancing straight and U-Type assembly lines with stochastic process times
    (2003) Şekerci, Halil
    In this thesis, we study the problem of assembly line balancing with stochastic task process times. The research considers both the well-known straight line balancing problem and U-line balancing problem where the line is paced, with no buffer inventories between stations. The objective is to minimize a two component cost function where the cost terms come from cost of manning the line and cost of finishing the incomplete units off the line. Cost is measured by an existing exact method for straight line balancing and a heuristic cost measurement method is developed for U-line balancing. The key idea in the core of this research is a task's marginal desirability for assignment at a given station. This idea is embedded in a beam search heuristic for solving both the straight line and U-line balancing problem. Extensive computational experiments and simulation experiments are made with well-known problems in the literature under the assumption of normally distributed task processing times. The quality of the solutions found by beam search for the straight-line balancing problem is compared to an existing method in literature. A simulation model of the assembly design is constructed and sample results from the U-line balancing problem are tested against the simulation results. The algorithm presented in this thesis improves the objective function by up to 24 percent.