Mixed-Model Assembly Line Balancing with Considering Reliability

This paper presents a multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm for the mixed-model assembly line balancing with stochastic processing times. Since, the stochastic task times may have effects on the bottlenecks of a system, maximizing the weighted line efficiency (equivalent to the minimizing the number of station), minimizing the weighted smoothness index and maximizing the system reliability are considered. After solving an example in detail, the performance of the proposed algorithm is examined on a set of test problems. The experimental results show the new approach performs well.