A comparative study on a selection of search design algorithms for solving the buffer allocation problem in serial production lines

In the design of production lines the classical approach to the buffer allocation problem (BAP) is to use a search algorithm in association with an evaluative algorithm to obtain the mathematical optimum of the specified objective function. In practice, a choice has often to be made between which search algorithm to use for the efficient solution of the BAP. This paper gives results of a carefully selected set of experiments on short (K= number of stations = 3, 4,...,11 stations), medium length (K=12, 13,...,30 stations) and longer lines (K=40, 50, ...,100 stations) with small N (N=total number of buffer slots = K/2 if K is even; = (K-1)/2 if K is odd), medium N (N=K+1) and large N (N=2K) to evaluate the effectiveness of the following search algorithms: simulated annealing, genetic, Tabu search, myopic and complete enumeration (where possible). All the experiments were run on a readily available desktop PC with the following specifications: Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3, Pentium® Dual-Core CPU E5300@2.60 GHz, 2,00GB RAM. The measures of performance used are computer time and closeness to the maximum throughput achieved.