The objective of this thesis is to create and develop new effective solution methods for production line configuration problems. Two problems were studied: the equipment selection and balancing problem for dedicated lines and the setup cost minimization problem for multi-product lines. A solution for the first problem consists in a feasible assignment of the resources to an unknown number of stations so that the total cost is minimized. In order to solve this problem, we reduced it to the set partitioning problem and solved it by greedy heuristics and an exact method of constraint generation. The computer experiments on different problem instances showed that the new solution approach outperforms the previous methods from the literature both in terms of solution quality and computational time. For the second problem two criteria were considered lexicographically: the minimization of the number of stations and the minimization of the total setup cost. We examined successively the cases with parallel and sequential execution of operations. Approximate solutions were found by greedy heuristics. Then, we proposed two integer programming models in order to obtain the minimal number of stations and then the minimal setup cost. The experimental results for this new problem proved to be promising both in terms of solution quality and computational time.
