Cyclic scheduling of flexible mixed model assembly lines with parallel stations

•Simultaneous balancing and cyclic scheduling of flexible mixed model assembly lines with parallel stations.•A novel Constraint Programming (CP) formulation is developed.•Exploiting symmetry breaking constraints and providing a problem specific search strategy.•Extensive number of experiments to show scalability of the approach.

In this paper, the problem of balancing and cyclic scheduling of flexible mixed model assembly lines with parallel stations is studied. To exploit the connection between balancing and cyclic scheduling problems for an efficient line management, they are considered simultaneously. A novel constraint programming model including problem specific symmetry breaking constraints is proposed to solve this problem. Experiments on extensive number of test instances with various sizes are also presented.