Title: Solving a multi-manned assembly line balancing problem in a Pareto sense

Authors: Parames Chutima; Krit Prasert

Addresses: Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand ' Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand

Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm which modifies the coincident algorithm (COIN), namely the adaptive extended coincident algorithm (AE-COIN), to solve a multi-manned assembly line balancing problem (MALBP). The multiple objectives are optimised in a hierarchical manner comprising of the following objectives: 1) minimise the number of workers; 2) minimise the number of stations; 3) balance workloads between stations and maximise work relatedness. The objectives in the third hierarchy are optimised in a Pareto sense since they are conflicting in nature. The performances of AE-COIN are compared against well-known algorithms, i.e., BBO, NSGA II and DPSO. The experimental results show that AE-COIN outperforms its contestants in both solution quality and diversity.

Keywords: assembly line balancing; ALB; multi-manned; coincident algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2018.095056

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2018 Vol.8 No.4, pp.490 - 515

Received: 24 Jun 2016
Accepted: 28 Oct 2016
Published online: 01 Oct 2018 *

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