A Mathematical Model for the Lexicographic Bottleneck Mixed-Model Flexible Assembly Line Balancing Problem

Abstract

In today's highly competitive market, manufacturing companies compete in order to achieve a superior customer response and significant cost savings. From this perspective, the lexicographic bottleneck assembly line balancing problem is recently introduced to the literature in order to implement more reliable assembly lines through increasing the quality of balance among the most heavily loaded workstations. The purpose of this work is to integrate the advantage of the flexible assembly lines through considering variety of resource alternatives for executing each task with the concept of the lexicographic bottleneck assembly line balancing. Accordingly, a new mathematical model called Lexicographic Bottleneck Mixed-Model Flexible Assembly Line Balancing Problem (LB-MFALBP) is formalized for the first time in the literature. In addition, an exact solution is proposed for optimally solving small instances using a commercial solver in a reasonable computation time.