Bee colony intelligence in zone constrained two-sided assembly line balancing problem

Bees Algorithm is a relatively new member of swarm intelligence based meta-heuristics which tries to model natural behavior of real honey bees in food foraging. Honey bees use several mechanisms like waggle dance to optimally locate food sources and to search new ones. This makes them a good candidate for developing new search algorithms for solving optimization problems in operational research. On the other hand, two-sided assembly lines are generally occurred in assembly of large-sized products such as buses and trucks. In a two-sided assembly line, different assembly tasks are carried out on the same product in parallel to both left and right sides of the line. In this study Bees Algorithm is adopted to solve two-sided assembly line balancing problem with zoning constraint so as to minimize the number of stations for a given cycle time. An extensive computational study is carried out and the results are compared with the results of several algorithms from the literature with the results of exact solution approaches and several algorithms from the literature such as ant colony optimization, tabu search.