Two-sided assembly line balancing using a branch-and-bound method

분지한계법을 이용한 양면조립라인 밸런싱

This paper considers two-sided (left and right side) assembly lines which are often used, especially in assembling large-sized products such as trucks and buses. A large number of exact algorithms and heuristics have been proposed to balance one-sided lines. However, little attention has been paid to balancing two-sided assembly lines. We present an efficient algorithm based on a branch and bound for balancing two-sided assembly lines. The algorithm involves a procedure for generating an enumeration tree. To efficiently search for the near optimal solutions to the problem, assignment rules are used in the method. New and existing bound strategies and dominance rules are else employed. The proposed algorithm can find a near optimal solution by enumerating feasible solutions partially. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to make the performance comparison between the proposed algorithm and existing ones. The computational results show that our algorithm is promising and robust in solution quality.