Heuristics for the re-balancing of a vehicle assembly line

This article deals with a re-balancing problem which is the object of an industrial collaboration with a French automotive firm. The constraints of the problem are composed of basic constraints from line balancing problems and of specific constraints such as working height and storage area length constraints. To solve the problem, we propose three heuristics based on operation transfers in order to obtain a feasible balancing or to improve it. The considered objectives are the minimisation of the number of stations, then the load smoothing while transfering a minimum number of operations. The objectives are independently considered.