Using ant techniques to solve the assembly line balancing problem

This paper presents an approach, based on ant techniques, to effectively address the assembly line balancing problem with the complicating factors of parallel workstations, stochastic task durations, and mixed-models. A methodology was inspired by the behavior of social insects in an attempt to distribute tasks among workers so that strategic performance measures are optimized. This methodology is used to address several assembly line balancing problems from the literature. The assembly line layouts obtained from these solutions are used for simulated production runs so that output performance measures (such as cycle time performance) are obtained. Output performance measures resulting from this approach are compared to output performance measures obtained from several other heuristics, such as simulated annealing. A comparison shows that the ant approach is competitive with the other heuristic methods in terms of these performance measures.