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Modern markets demand mass customization, that is, the manufacture of customized products at low cost. Mass customization represents a major challenge for the organization of assembly lines, which were originally designed for the manufacture of homogeneous products. The multiple-piece-flow assembly line is an organizational innovation that can address this challenge. Here, several customized workpieces, each associated with a separate customer order and, hence, a separate due date, are handled simultaneously in one cycle. Consequently, the idle times decrease as do the manufacturing costs. Multiple-piece-flow assembly lines are used, for instance, in manufacturing industrial equipment.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate product sequencing in multiple-piece-flow assembly lines. We formalize the underlying planning problem, establish a mixed-integer model, examine its …