Hybrid Metaheuristic for the Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem

摘要

The Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem (ALWABP) appears in real assembly lines which we have to assign given tasks to workers where there are some task-worker incompatibilities and considering that the operation time for each task is different depending upon who executes the task. This problem is typical for Sheltered Work Centers for the Disabled and it is well known to be NP-Hard. In this paper, the hybrid method Clustering Search (CS) is implemented to solve the ALWABP. The CS identifies promising regions of the search space by generating solutions with a metaheuristic, such as Iterated Local Search, and clustering them into clusters that are then explored further with local search heuristics. Computational results considering instances available in the literature are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the CS.