The line balancing problem consits in assigning tasks to stations in order
to respect precedence constraints and cycle time constraints. In this
paper, the cycle time is fixed and the objective is to minimize the number
of stations. We propose to use metaheuristics based on simulated annealing
by exploiting the link between the line balancing problem and the bin
packing problem. The principle of the method lies in the combination
between a metaheuristic and a bin packing heuristic. Two representations
of a solution and two neighboring systems are proposed and the methods are
compared with results from the literature. They are better or similar to
tabu search based algorithm.