Resource-Constrained Assembly Line Balancing Problem with Common Resource Usage

Companies must establish a profitable system to ensure their survival. Due to increased competition, businesses must now make sacrifices on the sales price of the product or service produced in order to remain competitive. Station opening costs play a significant role in assembly line installation costs. Furthermore, required resource investment is also important. There are limited studies in the literature on the resource-constrained assembly line balancing problem. However, there have not been any studies so far that allow resource sharing between stations. In this study, the resource-constrained assembly line balancing problem that allows resource sharing between stations is handled. A mathematical model is developed and evaluated for the resource-constrained assembly line balancing problem that allows resource sharing between stations. With the mathematical model, results are obtained for the general resource assignment case with and without resource sharing. For medium and large-sized problems, the mathematical model is not able to achieve results in acceptable times, so the Simulated Annealing algorithm is applied. Statistical analysis was performed for parameter optimization for the application of the algorithm. The obtained results show that the developed mathematical model is effective for small-sized problems and the proposed simulated annealing algorithm is effective for medium and large-sized problems