Ant Algorithm with Summation Rules for Assembly Line Balancing Problem

An improved ant colony optimization with pheromone summation rules is proposed to solve type 1 of the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP-1). The proposed algorithm makes use of the trail information which is deposited between the task and the task selected position, and pheromone summation rules is adopted. The heuristic information is set to the position weight for tasks of SALBP-1, which synthesis consider processing time of the task and the number of successors. A new nonlinear objective function is used to instead of the function of number of workstations. The proposed algorithm is tested and compared with literature test problems, the result indicated the validity of the proposed algorithms.