Title: Multi-objective mixed-model parallel assembly line balancing with a fuzzy adaptive biogeography-based algorithm

Authors: Parames Chutima; Nutthachai Yothaboriban

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand; Regional Centre for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand

Abstract: Parallel assembly lines (PALs) typify a production facility comprising of two or more straight assembly lines arranged in parallel to assemble similar products or different models of the same product. The configuration of PALs poses new challenges for the optimal design of the lines since the efficacy of the assembly system can be improved by combining stations of adjacent lines when balancing them. As a consequence, the multi-objective mixed-model parallel assembly line balancing problem is addressed in this paper. The hierarchical objectives to be optimised include: 1) minimising number of workstations; 2) minimising number of stations; 3) simultaneously minimising workload variation and maximising work-relatedness. The fuzzy BBO (F-BBO) algorithm is developed to tackle this problem and its performances are evaluated against several well-known algorithms under different instances of benchmark problems. The experimental results show that the solution quality of the proposed F-BBO is significantly better than the contestant algorithms.

Keywords: parallel assembly lines; assembly line balancing; biogeography-based optimisation; fuzzy BBO; adaptive BBO; multi-objective optimisation; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2017.083182

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2017 Vol.26 No.1, pp.90 - 132

Received: 16 Mar 2015
Accepted: 18 May 2015
Published online: 22 Mar 2017 *

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