Enhanced multi-Hoffmann heuristic for efficiently solving real-world assembly line balancing problems in automotive industry

•We explain how assembly process planning is typically done at Volkswagen.•We show that state-of-the-art ALBP solution procedures cannot be fully recommended for real-world.•We develop a new ALBP heuristic to cover requirements of real-world.•We show that the new procedure is competitive for specialized ALBP versions.

In production systems of automobile manufacturers, multi-variant products are assembled on paced final assembly lines. The assignment of operations to workplaces and workers deter mines the productivity of the manufacturing process. In research, various exact and heuristic solution procedures have been developed for different versions of the so-called assembly line balancing problem.This paper shows that there is almost no solution procedure so far, which includes all line balancing restrictions occurring in real-world settings. We present a new general and flexible as well as fast heuristic procedure which meets all relevant requirements of line balancing in automotive industry. It is based on the successful multi-Hoffmann heuristic of Fleszar and Hindi [European Journal of Operational Research 145/3 (2003), 606–620] which is enhanced and extended to consider the required restrictions. Computational experiments show that the new procedure is competitive to state-of-the-art procedures even for specialized problems and able to compute high-quality feasible solutions in different test settings typical in real-world decision situations.