Assembly line balancing type-1 problem with assignment restrictions: A constraint programming modeling approach

The assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) contains some constraints which are cycle time/number of stations and precedence relations between tasks. However, due to the technological and organizational limitations, several other restrictions, such as linked tasks, incompatible tasks, station, and resource constraints, can be encountered in real production systems. In this study, we evaluate the effect of these restrictions on ALBP. For this purpose, a Constraint Programming (CP) model is proposed. The objective of the model is to minimize the number of stations for given cycle time (Type-1 problem). We investigate the solution quality of the proposed CP model according to the mixed-integer programming (MIP) and ABSALOM in terms of the several performance measurements such as the number of proofing optimal solution, number of the optimal solution, number of the best solution, relative gap between the solution with the optimal solution and average total solution time. Furthermore, the proposed approach is tested on the literature test instances, and the comparison results between models are reported. Although assignment restrictions increase the complexity of the problem, numerical experiments demonstrate that CP is an effective and high-quality solution method in solving ALBP.