An efficient heuristic to sequence mixed-model assembly lines

Sequencing mixed-model assembly lines is a well researched topic in literature. However, many methods which were developed to solve this problem fail to cope with either the large size or specific characteristics of real-life instances. In this paper, an efficient heuristic is proposed which is able to handle large and supposedly difficult problem instances. Test scenarios considering real-life aspects were generated to evaluate the performance of the heuristic for realistic problem instances. It is shown that the proposed heuristic outperforms traditional priority rule-based methods known from literature and requires a similar computational effort.