With the growth in customers’ demand diversification, mixed-model U-lines (MMUL) have acquired increasing importance in the area of assembly systems. There are generally two different approaches in the literature for balancing such systems. Some researchers believe that since the types of models can be very diverse, a balancing approach without simultaneously sequencing of models will not yield...

This paper presents a multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm for the mixed-model assembly line balancing with stochastic processing times. Since, the stochastic task times may have effects on the bottlenecks of a system, maximizing the weighted line efficiency (equivalent to the minimizing the number of station), minimizing the weighted smoothness index and maximizing the system reliabil...