Survey, development, and application of algorithms for sequencing paced assembly lines

This paper focuses on sequencing issues for paced assembly lines on which many different models of a product are assembled. The authors provide a critical review of the literature, emphasizing objectives and algorithms designed for these problems. They then propose a new approach that can be generalized to solve a class of problems with one of several different objectives. For two commonly used objectives, the procedure is evaluated by comparing it with three existing procedures and with lower bounds on the optimal objective value. The results indicate that this new, flexible procedure performs very well.