Title: An enhanced harmony search algorithm for assembly sequence planning

Authors: Lijian Wang; Yuxing Hou; Xinyu Li; Shuai Sun

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China ' State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China ' State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China ' State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

Abstract: Assembly sequence planning (ASP) plays a critical role in manufacturing and product design. A good assembly sequence can help reduce the cost and time of manufacturing process. However, ASP is difficult to be tackled; the size of the search space of assembly sequences is exponentially proportional to the number of components of assembly products. Compared with traditional graph-based algorithm, the intelligent optimisation algorithms have exhibited their advantages in finding optimal assembly sequence. In this paper, harmony search (HS) is proposed to help solve the ASP problem. HS algorithm has been successfully applied to continuous-variable as well as combinatorial optimisation problems. To further strengthen the optimisation performance and be more effectively used for ASP problem, the proposed method incorporates the largest position value (LPV) rule and an efficient switching strategy of local search. The developed approach is validated with an illustrative example and the results are compared with those obtained using traditional genetic algorithm (GA) and memetic algorithm (MA). The result shows the proposed approach has achieved significant improvement.

Keywords: harmony search; assembly sequence planning; ASP; largest position value; local search; assembly sequences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2013.051929

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2013 Vol.18 No.1, pp.18 - 25

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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