Maximizing production rate and workload balancing in a two-sided assembly line using Harmony Search

Two-sided assembly lines are kind of assembly lines in which tasks operations can be performed in the two sides of the line. They are often used in manufacturing large sized products. In this paper, we proposed a bi-objective mathematical model to maximize the production rate and to distribute the workload of a two-sided assembly line with zone constraints. Harmony Search (HS) is proposed to solve and balance the problem. The HS uses the heuristic representation to encode the generated harmony element. Non-dominated sorting is implemented in the HS in order to obtain a set of diverse Pareto optimal solutions. Numerical examples are given to evaluate the proposed method. Comparison between the proposed HS and NSGA-II reveals that the proposed method has a better ratio and convergence for small and medium size problems, and has better solution spread for large size problems. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.