mixed model assembly lines; owing to the fact that their model was NP-hard, they developed a scheduling-based heuristic algorithm to solve it. Becker and Scholl (2009) considered a special case of MALBP with variable parallel workplaces (VWALBP); VWALBP assumes that the workpiece is divided into mounting positions each of which can be used by only a single worker in each workstation; they developed an exact solution procedure based on the branch-and-bound principle (called VWSolver). Fattahietal. (2011) presented a mixed-integer mathematical programming model and a heuristic algorithm based on the ant colony optimization approach for MALBP. Kelleg¨oz and Toklu (2012) addressed an assembly line balancing problem characterized by the presence of parallel multi-manned workstations; following the problem definition, they developed a branch-and-bound algorithm called Jumper, to optimally solve it. The recent paper by Roshani
et al. (2013) addressed the multi-objective MALBP; the authors proposed a simulated-annealing search algorithm to solve the problem while considering the line efficiency, the line length, and the smoothness index as the performance criteria. According to our best knowledge, only
one study appeared in the literature for MALBP withthe objective of minimizing cycle: Roshani and Roshani (2012) developed an ant colony based meta-heuristics for the problem and used their proposed method to solve some small and medium sized problems. The purpose of this paper is to develop a simulated annealing meta-heuristic approach to efficiently solve the this problem. According to the reviewing literature, this paper makes one of the first attempts to show how a
simulated annealing (SA) approach can be applied to solve MALBP with the objective of minimizing cycle time. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a summary description of MALBP with the objective of minimizing cycle. The proposed simulated annealing approach is presented in Section 3. In Section 4, computational studies are given. Concluding remarks follows in Section 5