A heuristic methodology for assembly line balancing considering stochastic time and validity testing

Assembly line balancing has gotten a considerable place in industrial importance. Hence, a lot of researchers are interested in this subject and several papers have been published until now. Many exact, heuristic, meta-heuristic, and hybrid approaches have been used to solve this type of problems. Different rules are applied for line balancing such as rank positional weight (RPW). Assembly line balancing problems are considered mostly in definite status, while the nature of manufacturing systems is accompanied with uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a model based on RPW algorithm considering uncertain time parameters for stochastic assembly line balancing. Also, two other methodologies of normal distribution integration and Monte Carlo simulation are developed. The effectiveness of the proposed model and validity testing with respect to other two approaches are illustrated using numerical examples.