The assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem with stochastic worker availability
研究了工人缺勤率高的庇护工场中，如何分配异质工人以最小化预期周期时间，提出了两阶段混合整数规划模型和局部搜索启发式算法。
Assembly lines can be employed successfully in sheltered work centres to better include persons with disabilities in the labour market as well as to improve production efficiency. The optimal assignment of a heterogeneous workforce is known as the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem (ALWABP). These assembly lines are characterised not only by a heterogeneous workforce, but also by high levels of absenteeism, which makes it more difficult to obtain stable and efficient line balancing solutions. In this paper, an extension of the ALWABP to minimise the expected cycle time under uncertain worker availability is proposed. We model this problem as a two-stage mixed integer program, and propose local search heuristics for solving it. Computational experiments show that stochastic modelling can help to improve the line’s efficiency and that the proposed heuristics produce good results for instances of practical size.