Comparison of techniques for mixed model assembly line balancing problem

In recent years, with the increasing competition and customer demand qualifications, companies search new ways to supply customer demands in a growing competition environment. Manufacturing systems as well as assembly lines are also being modified to achieve high productivity, low costs and higher flexibility. Mixed model assembly line balancing is one of the earliest approaches used for these purposes. There are various methods proposed for balancing mixed model assembly lines. However what about the applicability of the methods to real life problems. In this paper four methods (shortest route formulation, binary integer formulation, ranked positional weight technique and Bukchin et al.'s heuristic methodology) are applied to a real world case and the performances are compared. The results show that Bukchin et al.'s heuristic methodology gives the highest performance in terms of applicability and balancing performance, while in two of the methods even a solution could not be obtained.