Balancing of U-type assembly systems using simulated annealing

The paper presents a new simulated annealing (SA)-based algorithm for the assembly line-balancing problem with a U-type con®guration. The proposed algorithm employs an intelligent mechanism to search a large solution space. U-type assembly systems are becoming increasingly popular in today’s modern production environments since they are more general than the traditional assem- bly systems. In these systems, tasks are to be allocated into stations by moving forward and backward through the precedence diagram in contrast to a typical forward move in the traditional assembly systems. The performance of the algorithm is measured by solving a large number of benchmark problems available in the literature. The results of the computational experiments indicate that the proposed SA-based algorithm performs quite eŒectively. It also yields the optimal solution for most problem instances. Future research directions and a compre- hensive bibliography are also provided here.