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). Fattahi et al. (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 with
the 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