A novel Method for Solving the Uncertain Run-time Assembly Line Balancing Problem via the Improved Branch and Bound Method

Assembly line balance is an important issue in the production systems and is consist of many sub problems. The problem of the uncertainty operation time is the significant one, which actually exists but is rarely mentioned in the current research literatures. This paper develops a novel algorithm to tackle the uncertain operation time in the assembly line. For the developed algorithm, the tasks are allocated to the different workstations regarding the uncertain operation time, firstly. Then the minimum number of workstations and the minimum idle time of each workstation is computed. With the difference from the current models, the concept of protection time is constructed so that the uncertain running time is sufficiently regarded and measured in the developed algorithm. As a result, the 4 governing rules and mechanism for determining upper and lower limitation is developed based on the branch and bound method. Finally, experiments on the benchmark data set verify the effectiveness of the developed algorithm.