Dynamic programming to solve resource constrained assembly line balancing problem in footwear manufacturing

This study addresses the assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) in the sewing line of a footwear company with constraints not only on precedence relation of tasks and workstation's cycle time but also on resource constraints. The resource constraint is considered as a type of machines on each workstation in which every station can be operated by only one type of machine. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm, which can handle all the aforementioned constraints and is expected to find the optimal solution, to solve the resource constrained ALBP. The proposed dynamic programming is applied to 18 tested instances from a footwear company. The experimental results show that the proposed dynamic programming can achieve a promising performance for the real-world cases in footwear manufacturing.