RESEARCH ARTICLE

An improved artificial bee colony algorithm with MaxTF heuristic rule for two-sided assembly line balancing problem

  • Xiaokun DUAN 1 ,
  • Bo WU 1 ,
  • Youmin HU , 1 ,
  • Jie LIU 1 ,
  • Jing XIONG 2
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  • 1. School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
  • 2. School of Mechanical Engineering, Hubei Engineering University, Xiaogan 432000, China

Received date: 24 Jul 2017

Accepted date: 30 Jan 2018

Published date: 15 Jun 2019

Copyright

2018 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Abstract

Two-sided assembly line is usually used for the assembly of large products such as cars, buses, and trucks. With the development of technical progress, the assembly line needs to be reconfigured and the cycle time of the line should be optimized to satisfy the new assembly process. Two-sided assembly line balancing with the objective of minimizing the cycle time is called TALBP-2. This paper proposes an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm with the MaxTF heuristic rule. In the heuristic initialization process, the MaxTF rule defines a new task’s priority weight. On the basis of priority weight, the assignment of tasks is reasonable and the quality of an initial solution is high. In the IABC algorithm, two neighborhood strategies are embedded to balance the exploitation and exploration abilities of the algorithm. The employed bees and onlooker bees produce neighboring solutions in different promising regions to accelerate the convergence rate. Furthermore, a well-designed random strategy of scout bees is developed to escape local optima. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MaxTF rule performs better than other heuristic rules, as it can find the best solution for all the 10 test cases. A comparison of the IABC algorithm and other algorithms proves the effectiveness of the proposed IABC algorithm. The results also denote that the IABC algorithm is efficient and stable in minimizing the cycle time for the TALBP-2, and it can find 20 new best solutions among 25 large-sized problem cases.

Cite this article

Xiaokun DUAN , Bo WU , Youmin HU , Jie LIU , Jing XIONG . An improved artificial bee colony algorithm with MaxTF heuristic rule for two-sided assembly line balancing problem[J]. Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering, 2019 , 14(2) : 241 -253 . DOI: 10.1007/s11465-018-0518-6

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Supporting Plan (Grant No. 2015BAF01B04). The authors would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their thorough reviews, detailed comments, and constructive suggestions, which helped improve the quality of this paper.
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