Scholion.ai

Beam-ACO for Simple Assembly Line Balancing

Christian Blum

INFORMS Journal on Computing · 2008 · Volume 20 · Issue 4

DOI: 10.1287/ijoc.1080.0271

Abstract

Assembly line balancing problems are concerned with the optimization of manufacturing processes. In this paper we consider the so-called simple assembly line balancing problem with the objective of minimizing the number of used workstations. This problem is denoted by SALB-1 in the literature. For tackling this problem, we present a so-called Beam-ACO approach. This technique results from hybridizing the metaheuristic ant colony optimization with beam search. The experimental results show that our algorithm is a state-of-the-art method for this problem. It can solve 263 of 269 existing benchmark instances to optimality.

Keywords

computer science, artificial intelligence, production scheduling, planning, analysis of algorithms, suboptimal algorithms

Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.