Multi criteria assembly line balancing problem with equipment decisions

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Endüstri Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2006

Öğrenci: NİLÜFER PEKİN

Danışman: MERAL AZİZOĞLU

Özet:

In this thesis, we develop an exact algorithm for an assembly line balancing problem with equipment selection decisions. Two objectives are considered: minimizing the total equipment costs and the number of workstations. Our aim is to choose the type of the equipment(s) in every workstation and determine the assignment of the tasks to each workstation and equipment type. We aim to propose a set of efficient solutions for each problem and leave the choice of the best solution to the decision maker̕s preferences. A branch and bound algorithm is developed whose efficiency is increased with some dominance rules and powerful lower bounds. Moreover, modified ranked positional weight heuristic method is used as initial upper bound. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure is demonstrated by computational analysis in which the effects of changing certain parameter values are investigated. We find that our algorithm is capable of solving the problem instances with up to 25 tasks and 5 equipments.