A Tabu Search Algorithm for the Cost-Oriented Multi-Manned Assembly Line Balancing Problem

Plants manufacturing large-sized high-volume products, such as automobiles and trucks, usually encounter Multi-manned Assembly Line Balancing Problems (MALBPs). In this paper, a cost-oriented version of MALBPs, namely CMALBP, is taken into account. These types of problems may arise in the final assembly lines of products in which the manufacturing process is pretty labor-intensive. Since CMALBP is NP-Hard, a heuristic approach based on a Tabu search algorithm is developed to solve the problem. The proposed algorithm uses two neighborhood generation mechanisms, namely swap and mutation, which effectively collaborate with each other to provide new feasible solutions. Moreover, two separate tabu lists (corresponding with the two mentioned generation mechanisms) are used to check whether or not moving to a new generated neighbor solution is forbidden. To examine the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, some experimental instances were collected from the literature and solved. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed tabu search approach.