A production system which consists of a number of parallel assembly lines is considered. On each line a certain product is manufactured observing a common cycle time. By arranging the lines in a favourable manner, it is possible to increase efficiency of the production system by combining...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing products among the work stations along the line. On the one hand, research has focussed on developing effective...

In this paper we develop a new conditional penalty for the fixed charge transportation problem. This penalty is stronger than both the Driebeek penalties and the Lagrangean penalties of Cabot and Erenguc. Computational testing shows that the use of these penalties leads to significant reductions...

Iterated Local Search has many of the desirable features of a metaheuristic: it is simple, easy to implement, robust, and highly effective. The essential idea of Iterated Local Search lies in focusing the search not on the full space of solutions but on a smaller subspace defined by the...

Most approaches to multi-project scheduling are based on the assumption that resources can be transferred between projects without any expense in time and cost. As this assumption often is not realistic, we generalise the multi-project scheduling problem (RCMPSP) by additionally including...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) arise whenever an assembly line is con- figured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manu- facturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the work stations along the line sub- ject to a strict or...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the work stations along a manufacturing line as used in the automotive or the electronics industries. Usually, it is assumed that the production...

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of n jobs on m identical parallel machines so as to minimize the weighted sum of job completion times. This problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. The best approximation result known so far was a 1/2(1 + √2)-approximation algorithm that has been...

The sequence-dependent assembly line balancing problem Abstract Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the...