Exact and heuristic solutions for the assembly line balancing problem with hierarchical worker assignment

This paper proposes new algorithms for the assembly line balancing problem with hierarchical worker assignment (ALBHW). The ALBHW appears in real industrial contexts where companies deal with a multi-skilled workforce. It considers task execution times that vary depending on the worker type to whom the task is assigned. Qualification levels among workers are ranked hierarchically, where a lower qualified worker costs less but requires larger execution times. The aim is to assign workers and tasks to the stations of an assembly line, in such a way that cycle time and precedence constraints are satisfied, and the total cost is minimized. In this paper, we first present a mathematical model and improve it with preprocessing techniques. Then, we propose a constructive heuristic and a variable neighborhood descent that are useful to solve large instances. Extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances prove the effectiveness of the algorithms.