A NOVEL ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING THE ASSEMBLY LINE BALANCING TYPE I PROBLEM

This paper presents a new modeling approach called Progressive Modeling (PM) and demonstrates it by solving the Assembly Line Balancing Type I Problem. PM introduces some new concepts that make the modeling process of large-scale complex industrial problems more systematic and their solution algorithms much faster and easily maintained. In the context of SALBP-I, PM introduces a component model to deploy the problem logic and its solution algorithm into several interacting components. The problem is represented as an object-oriented graph G (V, E, W) of vertices, edges, and workstations which enables problem solutions to start anywhere. The novel representation relaxes the only forward and backward tracking approach used in the assembly line balancing literature. A set of well-reported problems in the literature are reported and solved. The paper concludes by demonstrating the efficiency of the new modeling approach and future extensions.