Extending metaheuristics based on bin packing for SALBP to PALBP

Parallel assembly line balancing problem (PALBP) considers a production system which consists of many parallel assembly lines. On each line, a product of a given type is manufactured according to the same cycle time. By arranging the lines in a favourable manner, it is possible to increase efficiency of the production system by combining stations of neighbouring lines when balancing the lines, i.e., an operator can work on two adjacent lines. The objective is to minimise the number of required operators. This problem has been considered first by Gökçen et al. (2006). We have already proposed efficient metaheuristics for SALBP-1. In this paper, we propose to investigate the link between SALBP-1 and PALBP and to adapt our metaheuristics for this problem. Two cases are considered. [Received 10 September 2009; Revised 10 June 2010; Accepted 23 November 2010]