A MULTIPLE-RULE HEURISTIC FOR ASSEMBLY-LINE BALANCING

This paper introduces a four-rule heuristic method for production/asse mbly line balancing which seeks to minimize the number of workstations for a given cycle time. To evaluate its performance, the proposed met hod was compared with 15 other heuristic methods ranging in complexity from random assignment of work elements to Hoffmann's enumeration pro cedure. The results, based on both randomly generated problems and pro blems taken from the literature, indicate that the proposed heuristic outperformed other procedures. Further, the suggested method was able to find the optimal solution for 57 (85%) of the 67 literature problem s.