BALANCING TRANSFER LINES WITH MULTI-SPINDLE MACHINES USING GRASP

A balancing problem for transfer lines with multi-spindle machines is considered. This problem has a number of particularities in comparison with the well-studied Assembly Line Balancing Problem, such as parameterized operation times, non-strict precedence constraints, and parallel operations performing. To solve this problem, a novel heuristic approach is suggested based on the scheme of greedy adaptive search procedure. A solution construction scheme taking into account the characteristics of studied problem is developed. At the improvement phase, the decomposition algorithm with aggregate solving of sub-problems is applied. Results of computational experiments are presented.