Selected heuristic methods used in industrial engineering

Abstract

This paper deals with a heuristic approach to material supplies of assembly lines (e.g. automotive industry) and to optimization of a stacker which is used in production lines or stores. A modern method for supplying assembly lines with material is using the so called 'mik run' trains supplying not only one point in assembly production lines but several points. A graph model is used. An analytical solution for creation of trains is not known; most probably it dose not exsit. Solutons using "brute force" may be very slow. They cannot be used for more than a dozen demands. A repeated random selection of n-tuples of transport demands and building of trains from this selection could be a good way to solve this task. A model of assembly production lines has been developed and the speed of convergence of random selections to a suboptimal solution has been calculated and measured. A thousand selections give good results. These heuristic results have been compared with some deterministic strategies (nearest demand, building of n-tuples). A similar approach has been used for optimization of a stacker in a workshop and in a store. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.