A multi-objective approach for design of reconfigurable transfer lines

This paper studies a multi-objective line balancing problem for reconfigurable transfer lines. In nowaday industry, machining lines need to be highly reconfigurable in order to cope with market’s demand. However, the design of these reconfigurable lines implies more difficult optimisation problems to solve and new methods are required. Moreover, with the high level of uncertainty on demand, decision-makers now look to other criteria than the sole investment cost.A new heuristic, based on the GRASP (greedy randomized adaptive search procedure) framework and using mixed integer programming for solving sub-problems, is proposed to deal with the search of trade-offs between cost and productivity for such reconfigurable transfer lines. A case study is also described and tested in order to illustrate the interest of the proposed approach.