Optimization of production planning problems - A case study for assembly lines

For a few years, Simulated Annealing (SA)(1) and related Monte Carlo optimi zation algorithms like Threshold Accepting (TR)a have become a useful means for optimizing various kinds of economic problems, like the Traveling Sale sman Problem (TSP). In this paper, we concentrate on the production process es themselves because most costs are thereby incurred, such that a small re lative improvement can lead to large savings. We will present an applicatio n of these physical optimization algorithms for a certain type of assembly lines which can be transferred to a TSP with additional constraints.