Line-seru conversion towards reducing worker(s) without increasing makespan: models, exact and meta-heuristic solutions
研究了生产线向单元生产转换中如何同时减少工人数量且不增加完工时间，提出了精确算法和元启发式算法求解不同规模问题，并通过实验验证了算法性能和管理启示。
Compared with the traditional assembly line, seru production can reduce worker(s) and decrease makespan. However, when the two objectives are considered simultaneously, Pareto-optimal solutions may save manpower but increase makespan. Therefore, we formulate line-seru conversion towards reducing worker(s) without increasing makespan and develop exact and meta-heuristic algorithms for the different scale instances. Firstly, we analyse the distinct features of the model. Furthermore, according to the feature of the solution space, we propose two exact algorithms to solve the small to medium-scale instances. The first exact algorithm searches the solution space from more workers to fewer workers. The second exact algorithm searches the solution space from fewer workers to more workers. The two exact algorithms search a part of solution space to obtain the optimal solution of reducing worker(s) without increasing makespan. According to the variable length of the feasible solutions, we propose a variable-length encoding heuristic algorithm for the large-scale instances. Finally, we use the extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms and to investigate some managerial insights on when and how to reduce worker(s) without increasing makespan by line-seru conversion.