Abstract
Assembly line balancing concerns the design of assembly lines for the manufacturing of products. In this paper we consider the time and space constrained simple assembly line balancing problem with the objective of minimizing the number of necessary work stations. This problem is denoted by TSALBP-1 in the literature. For tackling this problem we propose a Beam-ACO approach, which is an algorithm that results from hybridizing ant colony optimization with beam search. The experimental results show that our algorithm is a state-of-the-art metaheuristic for this problem.
This work was supported by grants TIN-2005-08818-C04-01 and DPI2004-03475 of the Spanish government, and by the “Juan de la Cierva” program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology of which Christian Blum is a post-doctoral research fellow. Moreover, we acknowledge Nissan Spain and the UPC Nissan Chair for partially funding this work as well as for providing real data.
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Blum, C., Bautista, J., Pereira, J. (2006). Beam-ACO Applied to Assembly Line Balancing. In: Dorigo, M., Gambardella, L.M., Birattari, M., Martinoli, A., Poli, R., Stützle, T. (eds) Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4150. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11839088_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11839088_9
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