How to design effective priority rules: Example of simple assembly line balancing

• Published in: Computers & industrial engineering Vol. 69; pp. 43 - 52
• Main Authors: Otto, Alena, Otto, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Elsevier Ltd 01-03-2014; Pergamon Press Inc
• Subjects: Assembly line balancing; Assembly lines; Branch & bound algorithms; Combinatorial optimization; Dynamic programming; Effectiveness studies; Heuristic; Heuristics; Job shops; Manufacturing; Mathematical problems; Priority rules; Rules; Assembly line balancing; Manufacturing; Combinatorial optimization; Priority rules; Heuristics
• ISSN: 0360-8352; 1879-0550
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2013.12.013

•We formulate general principles for design of effective priority rule-based methods (PRBM).•These are principles of aggregation, combination and random influence.•Extensive computational tests and statistical analysis show effectiveness of these principles.•The effectively designed PRBM are shown to outperform the state-of-the-art solution procedures.•We advice to speed up metaheuristic and exact algorithms by building-in the effectively designed PRBM.
Priority rule-based methods (PRBMs) rely on problem-specific knowledge to construct good solutions in a very short time. They can be used as stand-alone procedures or can be integrated into (partial) enumeration procedures, like branch and bound or dynamic programming, and heuristic solution methods. PRBMs are especially important for solving NP-hard optimization problems.
In this paper, we formulate general design principles on how to construct good-performing PRBMs, based on a thorough computational investigation. Our principles allow to construct effective PRBMs already ad hoc, i.e. without time-consuming data mining algorithms. We conduct our analysis on the example of the NP-hard Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP), on which with small modifications most situations in the planning of assembly lines are based. We also provide a cross-validation of our results and illustrate the application of the formulated principles.