Branch and bound procedures for solving the Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem: Application to Sheltered Work centres for Disabled Original Research Article

In this paper a new problem called Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem (ALWABP) is introduced. This problem arises in those assembly lines where we have certain limited resources available (normally workers) in which the operation time for every task is different depending on who executes the task, and where there are also some task–worker incompatibilities defined. The problem consists of providing a simultaneous solution to a double assignment: (1) tasks to stations; and (2) available workers to stations.