A turbine-blade balancing problem

In the turbine-blade manufacturing industry, turbine-blades are machined an d then assembled to form a circular roll of blades. The roll of blades shou ld be balanced smoothly as much as possible, since otherwise the efficiency of the turbine generator might be damaged. However, the blades to be assem bled into the same roll are not normally identical in weights and lengths, which makes the balancing job tedious and difficult. A turbine-blade balanc ing problem is formulated into a mixed-integer programming problem, which t urns out to be NP-hard. Several heuristics such as the peer heuristic, the goal chasing heuristic, and the interchange heuristic are developed and the computational results are presented. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All ri ghts reserved.