Parallel assembly lines worker assignment and balancing problem: A mathematical model and an artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

In today’s competitive world, assembly lines are one of the most important industrial manufacturing systems, which can accommodate the massive increase in customer demands and product range, for the production industry. One possible way to increase the capacity and efficiency of assembly lines is to design a parallel assembly line system, consisting of two or more assembly lines placed next to each other. In the literature, the assembly lines are usually balanced according to tasks with fixed processing times without considering worker–task compatibility. In real-life applications, however, since the processing time of each task may vary according to the capability of each worker, the assignment of tasks to stations in the assembly line depends on the skills of the worker assigned to the related station. Considering the worker and task assignments together for each assembly line will provide a more realistic perspective. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study that considers the minimization of joint cycle time for the worker assignment and assembly line balancing problem in parallel assembly lines (PALWABP-II). Accordingly, a binary linear mathematical programming (BLP) model is developed and an artificial bee colony (ABC)-based solution approach is proposed for medium and large-sized problems. A new set of test problems is presented to the literature for a computational experiment. In addition, a summary of the literature is presented. An example problem is solved using the BLP model. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model and approach, they are compared with the classical particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and ten different priority rules. The computational results on test problems prove the effectiveness of the proposed ABC algorithm for the PALWABP-II.