Integrated assembly line balancing with resource restrictions

This paper documents a study carried out on the problem of designing an integrated assembly line when many workers with a variety of skills are employed. This study addresses the problem of selecting multi-functional workers with different salaries to match their skills and of assigning tasks to work stations when there are precedence restrictions among the tasks. The objective of this study is to minimise the total annual work station costs and the annual salary of the assigned workers within a predetermined cycle time. A mixed integer linear program is developed with a genetic algorithm in order to address the problem of resource restrictions related to integrated assembly line balancing. Numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency of the developed genetic algorithm.