An assembly line balancing application on oven production line with hyper-heuristics

Abstract

In this study, an oven assembly line that is planning to re-establish manufacturing to increase the efficiency of the assembly process. The importance of the problem emerges from a real-world application consisting of product-oriented restrictions. These multiple restricted problems addressthe single model assignment restricted ALB problem with positional constraints. A cost-based objective function is used to cope with this problem. The number of platformed and non-platformed stations, the number of direction changesin a station, the number ofstationsin which both connector and combiner are used are the cost factors of the objective function. Also, the main objective of the problem is to minimize the total number of stations while satisfying the restrictions. A simulated annealing-based hyper-heuristic is adapted and applied to the balancing problem of oven manufacturing process with assignments and operationalrestrictions with multiple objectives. The resultsshow that bettersolutions can be found in the current line balance level while satisfying more restrictions. It is also observed that line balance can be improved depending on the relaxation of the restrictions.