Abstract
This paper presents a method for applying 0-1 integer programming to large assembly line balancing problems. The method is composed of the following two steps. Firstly, "the possibilities about the assignment of each work element to each station" are analyzed considering the precedence relationships among the elements, their operation times and the cycle time. Secondly, a subproblem whose number of 0-1 variables does not exceed an assigned value is formulated, based on the result of previous analysis. Then, an optimal solution of the subproblem is obtained by 0-1 integer programming. By applying the same procedure to the residual problem, the formulation and solution of a subproblem are repeated until obtaining a feasible solution of the original problem. An optimal or near-optimal solution of the original problem is mostly obtained. The computation time is reasonable even for a large scale problem because the size of each subproblem is limited.
