A bidirectional heuristic for stochastic assembly line balancing Type II problem

In this paper, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the single-model stochastic assembly line balancing Type II problem. For a given number of workstations and a pre-specified assembly line reliability, which is the probability of the workload not exceeding the cycle time for the whole assembly line, the proposed algorithm tries to obtain a solution with the smallest cycle time. In the first stage, the tasks are assigned to workstations from the forward and backward directions alternatively. In the second stage, the workload is smoothed by swapping tasks among workstations. At last, the upper bound of the cycle time obtained in the second stage is reduced step by step until the smallest cycle time satisfies the pre-specified assembly line reliability. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with a modified version of Moodie and Young's algorithm by applying them to some literature problems. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient in minimizing the cycle time for the single-model stochastic assembly line balancing problem.