Balancing assembly lines effectively - A computational comparison

We report on results of a numerical experiment including the most effective branch and bound procedures for solving type 1 of the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP-1), namely Johnson's (1988) FABLE, Nourie and Venta's (1991) OptPack, Hoffmann's (1992) Eureka and Scholl and Klein's (1997) SALOME. It appears that SALOME clearly outperforms the other procedures with respect to hard instances of a new challenging data set. Beyond that, it is shown that the performance of SALOME can greatly be improved by adding some further features including dynamic renumbering and dominance rules. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.