A hybrid PSO algorithm for a multi-objective assembly line balancing problem with flexible operation times, sequence-dependent setup times and learning effect

This paper addresses multi-objective (MO) optimization of a single-model assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) where the operation times of tasks are unknown variables and the only known information is the lower and upper bounds for operation time of each task. Three objectives are simultaneously considered as follows: (1) minimizing the cycle time, (2) minimizing the total equipment cost, and (3) minimizing the smoothness index. In order to reflect the real industrial settings adequately, it is assumed that the task time is dependent on worker(s) (or machine(s)) learning for the same or similar activity and sequence-dependent setup time exists between tasks. Finding an optimal solution for this complicated problem especially for large-sized problems in reasonable computational time is cumbersome. Therefore, we propose a new solution method based on the combination of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with variable neighborhood search (VNS) to solve the problem. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is examined over several test problems in terms of solution quality and running time. Comparison with an existing multi-objective evolutionary computation method in the literature shows the superior efficiency of our proposed PSO/VNS algorithm.