Bin packing extensions for solving an industrial line balancing problem

This paper deals with the relation between the bin packing problem and an industrial line balancing problem. In many papers, the bin packing problem has been linked to the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (one range of vehicles). To make this relation with a more complex industrial line balancing problem, we propose to extend the classical bin packing model in order to take into account specificities of our problem. After that, this new line balancing problem is solved with optimization methods dedicated to the bin packing problem. In order to integrate precedence constraints between operations, these methods are adapted by coupling them with methods for P/spl bsol/Prec/spl bsol/Cmax. The methods have been tested on real instances and have given good results.