Mixed model assembly line balancing with in-house parts supply considering the supermarket concept: A new mathematical model

The supermarket concept has become popular recently, especially for in-house part logistics systems, which are suitable for the full-time production philosophy of assembly lines that provide mass and high-volume production. The supermarket location problem (SLP) is to determine the location and number of supermarkets for the part supply from supermarkets to assembly stations. Considering the assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) and SLP together offers an important perspective in the facility planning step. This paper proposes a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to solve mixed-model assembly line balancing problem (MMALBP) and SLP together. The aim is to minimize the total cost of workstation installation, supermarket installation, and transportation. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed MILP model, two different model structures that solve MMALBP and SLP, both separately and simultaneously, are considered. Test problems widely used in the ALBP literature are used for computational experiments. The results of computational experiments show that the proposed model performs quite well in terms of both total costs and model execution time.