Balancing parallel assembly lines via Ant Colony Optimization

Increasing flexibility, reducing failure sensitivity, increasing productivity and balancing production lines (systems) are considered as critical factors for enabling competitiveness in manufacturing industry. Parallel assembly lines are proposed as alternative system configurations for improved production recently. This paper is focused on balancing parallel assembly lines which are very advantageous especially when the capacity of production system is insufficient. Unlike the traditional assembly lines there are a few studies on balancing parallel assembly lines in the literature. Parallel assembly line balancing is a NP-hard problem similar to all other assembly line balancing problems. In this paper, a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based algorithm is proposed for Parallel Assembly Line Balancing Problem (PALBP). The proposed algorithm is tested on several benchmark problems and its performance is compared with several other algorithms.