Two-sided assembly line balancing that considers uncertain task time attributes and incompatible task sets

An assembly line is a serial production system that is meant to produce high-quality and usually complex products in mass quantities. Assembly lines play a crucial role in determining the profitability of a company, as they are utilised as the final stage of the system prior to shipping. In an assembly line balancing problem, the assembly tasks are allocated to workstations based on their processing times after considering the precedence relationships between them. There is a massive amount of research in the literature using deterministic task processing times, and many other works consider stochastic task times. This research utilises the uncertainty theory to model uncertain task times and considers incompatible task sets constraints. The problem is solved using a simulated annealing algorithm with problem-specific characteristics. Lower bounds are developed to accelerate the simulated annealing algorithm. A restart mechanism, which can escape the local optimum obtained by neighbourhood generation, is proposed. A repair mechanism is integrated to combine the workstations so as to further improve the quality of solutions. The numerical examples and experimental tests demonstrate the powerful solution-building capacity of the proposed simulated annealing algorithm over teaching–learning-based and genetic algorithms. The methodology proposed in this research is applicable to any industry (including the automotive industry) when the historical data on task processing times is very limited.