LAUSR

Parallel assembly lines (PALs) typify a production facility comprising of two or more straight assembly lines arranged in parallel to assemble similar products or different models of the same product. The configuration of PALs poses new challenges for the optimal design of the lines since the efficacy of the assembly system can be improved by combining stations of adjacent lines when balancing them. As a consequence, the multi-objective mixed-model parallel assembly line balancing problem is addressed in this paper. The hierarchical objectives to be optimised include: 1) minimising number of workstations; 2) minimising number of stations; 3) simultaneously minimising workload variation and maximising work-relatedness. The fuzzy BBO (F-BBO) algorithm is developed to tackle this problem and its performances are evaluated against several well-known algorithms under different instances of benchmark problems. The experimental results show that the solution quality of the proposed F-BBO is significantly better than the contestant algorithms.