Modeling and solving constrained two-sided assembly line balancing problem via bee algorithms

Designing and operating two-sided assembly lines are crucial for manufacturing companies which assemble large-sized products such as trucks, buses and industrial refrigerators. This type of assembly line structure has several advantages over one-sided assembly lines such as shortened line length and reduced throughput time. The research area has recently focused on balancing two-sided assembly lines owing to these advantages. However, due to the complex structure of this problem, some practical constraints have been disregarded or have not been fully incorporated. In order to overcome these deficiencies, a fully constrained two-sided assembly line balancing problem is addressed in this research paper. Initially, a mathematical programming model is presented in order to describe the problem formally. Due to the problem complexity, two different swarm intelligence based search algorithms are implemented to solve large-sized instances. Bees algorithm and artificial bee colony algorithm have been applied to the fully constrained two-sided assembly line balancing problem so as to minimize the number of workstations and to obtain a balanced line. An extensive computational study has also been performed and the comparative results have been evaluated. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.