Tabu Search Algorithm for Single and Multi-model Line Balancing Problems

This paper deals with the assembly line balancing issue. The considered objective is to minimize the weighted sum of products' cycle times. The originality of this objective is that it is the generalization of the cycle time minimization used in single-model lines (SALBP) to the multi-model case (MALBP). An optimization algorithm made of a heuristic and a tabu-search method is presented and evaluated through an experimental study carried out on several and various randomly generated instances for both the single and multi-product cases. The returned solutions are compared to optimal solutions given by a mathematical model from the literature and to a proposed lower bound inspired from the classical SALBP bound. The results show that the algorithm is high performing as the average relative gap between them is quite low for both problems.