A new heuristic for car sequencing based on an integer programming approach

Nowadays products life cycle is short, the markets are opened and are highly competitive. For this reason the design and planning of mixed model assembly lines appears nowadays as a core competence where sequencing issues dealing with blockage and starvation caused by product variety need to be accounted for. In this paper we present a new exact approach for car sequencing that considers limited capacity, that cars for special markets should come first in the sequence and that cars with the same color should be clustered in the sequence. This new model is however complex and harder to solve. For this reason a new heuristic is presented. Results show that the use of this new heuristic integrated with the exact integer model seems to be a good approach for car sequencing problems.