Balancing of simple assembly lines under variations of task processing times

One of the simple assembly line balancing problems (SALBPs), known as SALBP-E, is considered. It consists in assigning a given set V={1,2,…,n} of elementary tasks to linearly ordered workstations with respect to precedence and capacity restrictions while minimizing the following product: number of used workstations × working time on the most loaded one. The stability of feasible and optimal solutions for this problem with regard to possible variations of the processing time of certain tasks is investigated. Two heuristic procedures finding a compromise between the efficiency and the considered stability measure of studied solutions are suggested and evaluated on known benchmarks.